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ARX

6.1.1

Release Note:ARX version 6.1.1

Original Publication Date: 08/29/2013

Summary:

This release note documents the version 6.1.1 release of the ARX software. This is a maintenance release. We recommend this release for those customers who want the fixes and enhancements listed in Fixes in This Release.

This release is cumulative, and includes all fixes and enhancements released since version 4.0.1. You can apply the software upgrade to 4.0.0 and later.

User Documentation for This Release

For a comprehensive list of documentation that is relevant to this release, refer to the ARX 6.1.1 Documentation page.

These manuals are available from the ARX GUI or CLI. From the GUI, click on the Documentation link in the navigation panel. From the CLI, use the show software command for a complete listing of the ARX manuals, then use the following command to upload the manual from the ARX:

Installing the Software

For an existing installation, you can upgrade to 6.1.1 from any of the following releases:

6.1.0

6.0.0

5.3.1 (ARX-VE only)

5.2.2

5.2.0

5.1.9

5.1.7

5.1.5

5.1.0

5.0.7

5.0.6

5.0.5

5.0.1

5.0.0

4.1.3

4.1.2

4.1.1

4.1.0

4.0.1

4.0.0

For installation instructions, refer to the Upgrading Software chapter of the CLI Maintenance Guide. If you must upgrade from a release prior to 4.0.0, you must upgrade both peers to one of the releases listed above before upgrading them both to the current release.

In a redundant pair that starts at a Release before 5.2.0, you must invoke an additional failover after both peers are upgraded. The final failover, with both peers at 6.1.1, makes it possible to upgrade the internal database for quota tolerance support.

When upgrading an ARX 1500 or ARX 2500 to Release 6.1.1 from a release before 6.1.0, a metalog latency trap may be raised during the upgrade process. The trap should clear within minutes of completing the rolling upgrade.

To install a new ARX system, refer to the ARX's installation manual. A hardcopy is included with each hardware platform, and an online copy of the ARX-VE Installation Guide is available with its OVF file.

For upgrade instructions, refer to the Upgrading Software chapter of the CLI Maintenance Guide.

Configuration Changes

Once you install the software, refer to the Required Configuration Changes section, which contains important information about activating your license. You must do this before using the new software.

Downgrading to an Earlier Release

Downgrades are not recommended. Contact F5 Support if you feel you need to downgrade to an earlier software release. For detailed instructions, refer to the Upgrading Software chapter in the CLI Maintenance Guide; this contains a section specific to downgrades.

Warning If you downgrade to Release 5.0.5 or earlier, do not downgrade the firmware with it. Earlier firmware could render the ARX unresponsive.

Fixes and Enhancements in This Release

Release 6.1.1 includes several new features and fixes, described in the sections below.

Release 6.1.1 adds the following features to the ARX:

Dell Exanet Support

This release provides support for NFS mount portmapper behavior in Dell Exanet filers.

Mac OS X Lion Support

This release provides support for interoperability with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

Fixes

Release 6.1.1 adds the following fixes to the ARX:

370246, 370024
Complete support for the Status and Alert LEDs on the ARX 1500 and ARX 2500 is provided now. Complete descriptions of the LED behavior are provided in the ARX Hardware Reference Guide.

370385
Autonegotiation now works correctly on out-of-band management ports.

368594, 371493
A problem with the count form of the ip proxy-adress command that caused proxy IP address assignments to be created out of order, and resulting subsequently in the creation of core files, has been fixed.

371823
A problem in which the deletion of a share farm containing shares caused those shares to not appear in the Tiered Storage wizard has been fixed.

372102
The ARX 1500 and ARX 2500 no longer exhibit problems with configurations that use VLAN 1 and in which all interfaces are used as members of channels.

371093
A problem that caused a single logical IP address to be associated with multiple proxy IP addresses has been fixed. In addition, the SNMP trap that was raised when this occurred has been corrected to refer to logical IP addresses rather than external IP addresses.

Fixes and Enhancements in Prior Releases

The current release includes the fixes and enhancements that were distributed in prior releases, as listed below. (Prior releases are listed with the most recent first.)

Version 6.1.0

Release 6.1.0 included the following fixes and enhancements, also included in this release.

Features

Release 6.1.0 added the following features to the ARX:

Statistics Monitoring

The stats-monitor process was added to the ARX software, monitoring the time taken for requests to filers, requests to clients, requests to other external devices, and internal processing. If the times increase by a wide-enough margin over a long-enough time, the stats-monitor places an alert message into the ARX syslog file. You can use the stats-monitor CLI command to enter a new CLI mode, where you can enable SNMP traps for each of these alerts. You can also change the alert thresholds from this mode. These statistics are logged in corresponding files, and their running histories can be displayed.

The ARX collects all of the statistics by default, but no analysis is performed until the stats-monitor is configured. As such, the corresponding alerts are not displayed in the syslog by default.

The stats-monitor command and its sub modes are beta-level software in Release 6.1.0. They have not been tested as rigorously as other 6.1.0 features. You use the terminal beta command to reveal all beta-level commands, including this one.

NetApp Volume Level Import

Support has been added for multiprotocol configurations in which ARX managed volume shares are imported from NetApp filers at the NetApp volume level (as opposed to at the QTree level).

In previous releases, migrations would fail in such configurations. This increased support does not entail any command changes or additions.

Enhanced Volume Free Space Reporting For CIFS

It is possible now to display the free space for a volume in the context of the user account and path used to access the volume. This enhancement supports path-based quotas. The freespace cifs-quota CLI command has been added to gbl-ns-vol mode, enabling volume free space to be displayed based on the credentials of the user executing the command and the path by which the volume is accessed.

This behavior is disabled by default (no freespace cifs-quota), causing the system-wide free space algorithm to be used, as was the case in previous releases. Use the filer-subshares CLI command to enable CIFS subshares prior to using this feature; refer to the ARX CLI Storage-Management Guide for complete instructions.

Note that this command pertains specifically to CIFS clients, and has no effect upon NFS queries.

Enhanced Free Space Reporting By Directory Master Only

The functionality for reporting volume size and free space has been enhanced so that it is possible to display the free space only for the back-end file system that is being accessed, rather than for the entire managed volume. This is useful in cases such as file migration, in which the temporary existence of two filesystems for the one in migration could otherwise distort the results of volume size and free space reporting. This is accomplished via a new argument for the existing freespace calculation CLI command, dir-master-only, which causes the share in question to be queried only on the storage resource at which its master instance resides.

In addition, the freespace apparent-size CLI command has been added to gbl-ns-vol-shr mode, enabling an administrator to configure an artificial capacity value for the volume that is less than or equal to its actual capacity. This command is accessible only in dir-master-only mode.

This functionality has no effect on policies and shadow volumes, for which actual free space, not apparent size and free space, is in use at all times.

NSM Warm Restart

NSM warm restart now is supported on older ARX platforms with multiple cores (ARX-2000 and ARX-4000). This feature improves behavior associated with the older processor designs used by those platforms, and is not relevant to the newer ARX-1500 and ARX-2500 models.

One aspect of NSM recovery is that once an NSM reanimates, not all cores within the same processor can be Up again without reloading; this is inherent to the design of the NSM.s internal failover behavior. The system functions at a reduced level when this occurs. NSM warm restart functionality addresses this situation by restarting only the NSM core that failed. The other cores within the same processor remain unaffected. When restarted, the NSM comes back Up (not in Standby) and resumes its normal traffic load.

Fixes

364072, 372846
A problem that prevented users from accessing other volumes when they had a destaged volume mounted has been fixed.

372101
A problem that caused snapshot creation to fail on Windows servers using UTC as their timezone has been fixed.

369688, 370792
A problem that caused virtual services to take four to five minutes to restart following a failover has been fixed by changing the ARX's management of TCP connections to metadata filers.

370559
A problem that caused the ARX to send port mapper requests to a client from virtual IP addresses other than the virtual IP address to which the client was connected has been fixed.

371604
A problem that caused snapshot creation to fail due to replica-snap shares being included in the snapshot has been fixed.

369429
The ARX 1500 and ARX 2500 now properly reject HTTP requests to the ARX VIP.

368437
A problem that caused the show processor command to report erroneously low memory values for the ARX 1500 and ARX 2500 has been fixed.

358440, 367861
A problem that caused an active ARX to not come back up after a failover has been corrected with a non-user-visible change to the redundancy software.

369319
A performance degradation problem caused by file descriptors not being released at the appropriate times has been fixed.

368456
A problem that caused a paired NSM core when a replacement ARX re-establishes redundancy has been fixed.

358181
The CIFS protocol specification requires that filer-assigned tree connection identifiers be unique across a single tree connection. The Sun filer violated this rule, causing the ARX to be unable to connect more than one user session to any given share. The ARX has been changed to be less sensitive to strict protocol adherence in this regard.

365664
In Release 6.0.0, RAID verification runs automatically every five minutes, which affects Metalog performance on ARX 1500 and ARX 2500. Once Release 6.1.0 is installed on ARX 1500 or ARX 2500, RAID verification runs once per day at 23:00, beginning the day after Release 6.1.0 is installed. On other ARX platforms, the RAID verification behavior will not change after Release 6.1.0 is installed. If the RAID verification mode is manual, and RAID verification has not been run on ARX 1500 or ARX 2500 in the last 24 hours, the traplog will show an entry reminding the user to execute RAID verification.

365373, 367709
A problem existed that when volume configuration was edited via the GUI, the metadata shares in ARX disaster recovery clusters would become misconfigured. This problem manifested only in disaster recovery clusters and is fixed now.

362587
An internal timing issue that previously caused a core during shutdown of the metalog daemon has been addressed.

359321
If users activate the licenses on switches in the same redundant switch pair at different dates, the expiration times for these licenses will be different. License keys with different expiration dates that are used in a redundant ARX pair now cause a trap to be raised only if the difference in the expiration dates is greater than one day.

360072
The software now checks more closely to prevent multiple users in concurrent configuration sessions from creating overlapping global servers.

351983
The ARX now provides an appropriate error message if the client attempts to perform a destructive rename of a file system object that is not supported.

35866
EMC servers support 3 or more colon (:) characters in their named-stream names. This naming convention is unsupported by other CIFS servers, so previous ARX releases could not migrate these named streams from an EMC server to another vendor's server.

Now, whenever an ARX migrates an EMC named stream with this naming issue, it renames the stream so that the migration can succeed. The ARX software keeps the first and last colon, and replaces each intermediate colon with '~'. For example, the ARX changes

myfile:this:that:another:thing:$DATA

to

myfile:this~that~another~thing:$DATA

at the target file server. The name remains the same at the EMC server.

36446
The show statistics filer CLI command now displays round trip times for CIFS and NFS responses, providing more data about filer performance.

346623
In releases before 5.02.000, a CIFS-only managed volume occasionally included user- based and path-based storage quotas in its free-space calculations. For example, if a CIFS client had a quota of 5G on a back-end Windows share with 500G of actual space, the CIFS client only saw 5G for that Windows share. If filer subshares were configured in the ARX volume, path-based quotas were also taken into account on some occasions.

These quota-based free-space calculations were inconsistent, so they were eliminated in Release 5.02.000. Following that Release, all CIFS clients saw the full free space on all back-end shares behind their ARX volumes, regardless of any space quotas those clients may have had on the back-end Windows Servers.

The current release introduces the freespace cifs- quota CLI command, providing reliable support for the original behavior. With this option enabled, clients see the sum of the quota-based free space on the volume's back-end shares, not the sum of the full free space. Thus, CIFS clients with a 1G quota see only 1G of space, and connections to a CIFS subshare with a 5G quota see only 5G of space.

346315, 365990
A problem that caused ARX clients to disconnect when the standby ARX in a redundant pair had its software reloaded has been fixed.

337794
The remove-share command no longer fails due to an excessively short timeout value for obtaining free space information for the shares it is used to remove. The corresponding timeout value has been increased to prevent this from happening.

353418
When a remote syslog is configured for an ARX, the syslog file no longer uses "localhost" as the ARX hostname.

339067
An internal change has been made in the NSM software to prevent the NSM from crashing when it attempts to log a catalog message.

28837, 359460
On ARX HA pairs, changes in global configuration data are synchronized to each ARX database with a two-phase commit, starting with the standby. A small time window exists where if the standby ARX reboots in the middle of a two-phase transaction, the active ARX might hold the transaction open (in limbo) due to uncertainty of the remote commit.

Limbo transactions now are rolled back on the active ARX if the standby is known to be down. In this case, it doesn't matter if the transaction was committed on the standby, because, when it pairs up with the active again, all of its global data will be resynchronized.

364194
A problem related to the "at" schedule command and automatic retries caused by DB transaction conflicts has been fixed. The "at" schedule command now handles transaction retries independently of the automatic retry mechanism used by the rest of the CLI.

352585, 351662
Snapshot creation no longer holds open filer share records for long periods of time, reducing the corresponding transaction conflicts.

359489
Shares are no longer marked as "Pending Import" when a recursive sync is performed on a volume that is in the same instance in which another volume is imported after the beginning of the sync operation.

357803
Previously, if the state of a share changed in the process of a failover, it was possible that the share was not marked online on the new active switch. This has been fixed.

361100
When using the show redundancy quorum-disk command, the fractional part of a minute is no longer included in the most current interval. For example, if the most recent interval is 10:00 - 10:33, but the current time is 10:33:45, the last 45 seconds of data will no longer be included. This rectifies a problem in which heartbeat latency counts were not consistent.

358828
Enabling a virtual service using ARX Manager when the virtual service has been configured with a cluster name now works correctly.

337805
Place rules no longer return a "Target full" message if the target is a share farm that includes only a single share.

356324
The filer type windows cluster command has been added to configure a Windows Server 2008 (or later) file server explicitly as a cluster node. This fixes a problem in which the disabling of NetBIOS on Windows Server 2008 (or later) cluster nodes caused ARX snapshots to identify cluster nodes incorrectly as non-cluster nodes, and fail to create snapshots. The command also adds the capability to discover the Windows Server 2008 (or later) cluster through WinRM when the cluster is not set explicitly through the CLI.

360938
The "STALLED" trap now appears for directory import operations only if a single directory has failed to complete import for over 60 seconds.

365802
A check is made now to see if the client connection state referenced by a transaction is still valid before error statistics are accessed and incremented. This fixes a crash that was caused by disconnection from the front end and subsequent attempts to increment error statistics associated with that client connection state.

362131
An internal issue that sometimes caused namespace creation using the GUI to generate a Java core dump has been corrected.

364078
A problem that prevented configuration of more than six channels on an ARX has been corrected. The ARX now allows configuration of up to eight channels, as described in the ARX user documentation.

360963, 364660, 365759, 365760
A problem in which a network outage caused corruption in the NSM's packet buffer and a subsequent double free of memory that resulted in a core file has been fixed.

359287
To avoid network capture file data loss when merging large capture files (> 2GB) on an ARX-4000, use the no-merge option in the no capture session command.

357345, 357155
Shadow volume functionality now creates the .acopia directory on Samba filers differently, creating the directory without specifying a security descriptor, and making and applying an appropriate ACL. This fixes a problem that caused shadow volume creation to fail when running SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 and Samba Version 3.4.3-1.19.1-2426-SUSE-CODE11.

357895, 365739
The ARX software now checks to make sure that an IP address assigned to an interface on an ARX 1500 or ARX 2500 is not in use on the switch already.

35791
Executing the clear statistics migration command for a specified volume now clears statistics for that volume only, and does not affect other volumes.

359090
The maximum number of snapshots that are identified with instance numbers now matches the maximum number of snapshots retained per rule. This maximum number is 1024.

359839
A problem that caused place-rules to run after reload rather than according to their configured scheduled has been fixed.

360731
You can use the domain-join operation to join an Organizational Unit (OU) within a Windows domain. The documentation and online help indicate that you should use a backslash character (\\) to separate the layers in a nested OU, but the domain-join previously failed with this separator. Now the domain-join succeeds with a backslash in the OU.

360950
Support for multiprotocol namespaces in NFS services no longer allows exporting from different namespaces with inconsistent protocols. For example, exporting from namespace A with protocol NFS2 and exporting from namespace B with protocol NFS3 is not allowed now.

361216
NFS TCP connections no longer get stuck in the RETRYING state and cause the service to hang if an NSM on ARX-2000 or ARX-4000 crashes and the switch fails over to its redundant peer.

361604
Executing the show exports external -filer no longer displays the string, "64: Bad Source:" for the Ping output. This was a cosmetic issue that did not affect the rest of the command output.

363569, 358069
The Tiered Storage wizard in the ARX GUI now displays existing namespaces and volumes the first time it is invoked. Previously, existing namespaces and volumes did not appear in the wizard until it had been invoked a second time.

363892
A series of proxy IP addresses (10.46.125.200/16 through 10.46.125.220/16) that are allocated for use on older ARX platforms are included in the command output when "show ip proxy-addresses" is executed on ARX-1500, ARX-2500, and ARX-VE. The output for this command on ARX-1500, ARX-2500, and ARX-VE now indicates that the corresponding MAC address for each proxy IP address as "Unresolved"; previously, an unused MAC address was shown for each.

364279
Enabling a port on VLAN 4009 on the ARX-1500 and ARX-2500 no longer causes the unit to reboot.

357044
The F5-proprietary traplog SNMP MIB now is supported for ARX 1500 and ARX 2500.

Version 6.0.0

Release 6.0.0 included the following fixes and enhancements, also included in this release.

Features

ARX-1500 and ARX-2500

Release 6.0.0 supports two new hardware platforms: the ARX-1500 and the ARX-2500. These are 1U devices. The ARX-1500 has eight 1-Gigabit interfaces, and the ARX-2500 has four 1-Gigabit interfaces and two 10-Gigabit interfaces.

Multiple Namespaces Behind a Single VIP

Clients can now access multiple namespaces through a single Virtual IP (VIP) address.

ARX Feature Licensing

As of Release 6.0.0, ARX feature functionality is controlled on each ARX by a license file that determines which features are active and which are disabled, according to the terms of the license agreement associated with that specific ARX. An ARX cannot be used without a valid license, and any customer upgrading to Release 6.0.0+ must obtain and activate a license in order to use the features and functions of the ARX.

Improved Performance For File System Enumeration

Performance of certain directory enumeration operations for NFS clients has been enhanced by reducing the client-to-ARX network traffic by 50:1. This is noticeable especially if the NFS client's network path to the ARX is low bandwidth, high latency, or both.

Probes and Windows Domain Authentication Enhancements

Release 6.0.0 provides a number of supportability enhancements and improvements of the CIFS subsystem, including new probe commands and configuration enforcement.

Support for EUC-JP Character Encoding for NFS

NFS character encoding is the numeric encoding for the characters used in human language. In former releases, the ARX supported two character encodings for its NFS services: ISO 8859-1 and UTF8. As of Release 6.0.0, NFS on the ARX also supports EUC-JP and Shift-JIS, two encodings for Japanese, along with KSC5601.

Terminology Change: VPU Domains Become Volume Groups

Each ARX volume resides in a volume group, in which the group has a finite amount of memory and processing power to be shared among its volumes. Volume groups are a means of isolating namespaces in the ARX's memory so that the failure of one or more namespaces in one volume group does not affect the performance of namespaces in other volume groups.

In previous releases, volume groups were known as "VPU domains." The terms "VPU" and "VPU domain" are no longer valid as of Release 5.3.0. This change in terminology has been made to reflect more accurately the use of dynamic, virtualized resources in newer ARX models.

Fixes

Release 6.0.0 adds the following fixes to the ARX:

369267
When an ARX virtual snapshot takes longer than two minutes, the WinRM connection from ARX to the Windows file server may be reset by the Windows file server, causing the snapshot operation to fail. The ARX now re-establishes the WinRM connection and completes the snapshot operation with the new connection.

368040
The ARX 1500 and ARX 2500 no longer exhibit problems with configurations that use VLAN 1 and in which all interfaces are used as members of channels.

356566, 362646
In the ARX GUI, it is now possible to select a volume and run a metadata report for it. Previously, you were required to select a share.

361293
It is no longer necessary to clear an expired ARX software evaluation license before activating a new evaluation license.

354991, 362808
When disabling "email-event tech-support", "no enable" now is added to the running configuration explicitly. Previously, "enable" was simply removed from the configuration.

360959
Automatic license activation now works correctly regardless of whether an in-band management interface is configured or not.

361219
The show filer connections CLI command now works correctly on ARX-1500, ARX-2500, and ARX-VE.

359470, 360509
A problem that caused DNAS to generate a core file during a read-only share import has been fixed.

356787
When you use the ARX Manager (GUI) to add a new file server to the configuration, you can click a check box labeled Supports Snapshots. In previous releases, the following sequence failed:

check that box,

click Save,

go back and uncheck the Supports Snapshots box.

Now the operation succeeds after the above sequence.

352357, 356190
If the backup ARX rebooted while the active ARX was processing a configuration change, the internal database process held open a transaction indefinitely. This open transaction resulted in a growing set of syslog messages, indicating that "Object Manager transaction id ... is now time-period seconds old." This also slowed the performance of other processes on the ARX.

A poorly-timed reboot of the backup ARX no-longer triggers these issues.

342258
During a disk replacement in an ARX-2000 or ARX-4000, it was possible for the ARX to misinterpret the state of the failed disk and its replacement. When this occurred, the incorrect disk state blocked the raid rebuild operation. This prevented the overall disk replacement from succeeding.

351996
The ARX-2000 or ARX-4000 occasionally recorded an incorrect battery temperature, and then sent spurious nvramBatteryFail traps.

359168
The CLI Reference and CLI Storage Guide described an incorrect syntax for nested OUs. The context of this documentation is the domain-join operation, which joins an ARX CIFS service to a Windows Domain (or an OU within a domain). The documentation stated that you should separate each OU layer with a backslash (\) character; the CLI documentation now shows the correct forward slash (/).

353198
The ARX SNMP Reference has been updated to reflect that internal disk usage is monitored via the systemResourceThresholdRaise and systemResourceThresholdClear traps.

348790
Some ARX 500 units were released to the field without programmed serial numbers that should be displayed when the show chassis command is executed. The process of acquiring a base registration key for ARX software license activation has been modified to accommodate these units.

359641
After a software upgrade from a pre-5.2.0 Release to a post-5.2.0 Release, the show policy command failed with a POLICY_UPGRADING error. Now the command succeeds after the upgrade.

354004
It is possible, but generally inadvisable, to make changes in the ARX global configuration under these circumstances:

there are two ARX devices, joined in a redundant pair,

one has upgraded to a new software release, but the other has not, yet, and

the peer with the lower release is active.

In former releases, there was no warning in the CLI or the ARX manager (GUI) when you entered the gbl CLI mode or otherwise started to edit the global configuration. Now there is an appropriate warning.

354164
An ARX-VE disconnected a CIFS client that tried to copy a file to an ARX service with a particular configuration issue. This failure occurred when SMB signatures were enabled on only the back-end server and not the front-end CIFS service on the ARX.

354434
When a redundant pair is unable to form due to a "Peer synchronization failure", the collect, show namespace, or show virtual service operations often took excessive time. This only occurred on the initial rendezvous for the redundant pair. Now these operations are slowed by only 1 to 4 minutes by these circumstances, as opposed to hours.

355365
The ARX VIP PORTMAP service did not respond correctly for non-supported RPC service versions, which prevented the use of common RPC-query tools. For example, rpcinfo -t arx-vip 100003 (NFS) and rpcinfo -t arx-vip 100021 (NLM) both failed. Now, both of those commands succeed for any ARX VIP running an NFS service.

355562
In a multi-protocol (CIFS and NFS) ARX volume with "euc-jp" character encoding, the ARX software arbitrarily changed filenames with tilde (~) characters. CIFS clients saw the name correctly, but NFS clients saw a different name. In this release, NFS clients and CIFS clients see tilde characters correctly in all filenames.

37389, 356436
An issue that caused a core dump when a service began to exit but had not completed has been fixed.

347396
Previously, all 'filer-subshare' exports that shared out a single CIFS volume (or a multi-protocol volume supporting CIFS) were required to have unique names, even when the subshare exports were configured in different CIFS services. This restriction no longer exists.

352000
The Tiered Storage wizard under the Policy > Place Rules menu has been modified so that it handles optional filesets and intersection filesets correctly.

Previously, the wizard included a selection that corresponded to a deprecated CLI command that the ARX software no longer recognized.

343058, 342994, 342941, 342994
An issue that had caused problems with switch replacement under a specific set of circumstances has been fixed.

The circumstances were:

The export path in an external-filer configuration was greater than 900 bytes, or the description for a policy schedule was greater than 255 bytes.

You upgraded the ARX cluster from Release 5.0.6 or earlier.

One of the peers in the cluster irrevocably failed, and you replaced it.

If all of the above conditions were met, the replaced peer (in the Backup role) was not able to rejoin the cluster.

351459
The policy engine logged a syslog message whenever it refused to migrate a file to a share that was too full. (A share is considered too full when it has dropped to its minimum free space, set with the policy freespace command or its GUI equivalent.) These messages were correct, but excessive. Now the syslog only includes a summary message for many migrations at a time.

353445
Mac running 10.5.8 and DAVE 7.1.2 was unable to access a direct share through the ARX

352410
The NSM now will refuse Transaction2 requests and responses that appear to use a segmentation protocol that the NSM does not currently support.

352673
A log error message has been added to warn users when they access a CIFS service that uses a different name in DNS than it does in Active Directory.

352127
A problem that caused the CLI to generate a core file when the "ssh-host-key rsa encrypted-hostkey" command was invoked with command completion (i.e., "ssh-host- key rsa encrypted-hostkey ?") has been fixed.

340762
Erroneous log messages reporting internal errors are no longer written when an attempt to create a snapshot fails because the filer is at capacity already.

352915
A problem with ARX-VE evaluation license keys that caused spurious CIFS browsing upgrade messages to appear has been fixed.

343244, 344331
The ARX sometimes exceeded 2,048 simultaneous tree connections in a single TCP connection. Some back-end file servers cannot tolerate this number of tree connections per TCP connection.

343027
An ARX-CIFS service issued a STATUS_INVALID_PARAMETER response whenever a client tried to copy an EFS encrypted file to the service. This resulted in an unclear error at the Windows-client application. Now the CIFS service returns a STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED error, which is more likely to be interpreted into an understandable error by client applications.

37533
The initial-boot script contained an unclear directive at the end:

"press yes to continue, or r to restart"

This could be misinterpreted as a command for rebooting the ARX. Now the interview clearly states that "r" only restarts the interview script.

36177
Management of Active Directory using the active-directory commands now requires only storage-engineer privilege, rather than crypto-officer privilege.

339306
A maximum of 30 snapshot rules can be associated with a single schedule.

342499
A problem that caused virtual services to to get stuck at "Starting" has been fixed.

345018
A problem has been fixed in which deleted folders would re-appear empty when performed by a Windows 7 client accessing a home directory via DFS and the ARX.

348789, 348355
The NSM no longer crashes when a backup ARX takes over for an ARX that has rebooted following an excessive number of connections.

338795, 338143
A problem that prevented the addition of Active Directory accounts when changing folder or file level security permissions through the ARX VIP has been fixed.

342666
An ambiguous NOTE-type message has been clarified to describe the corresponding issue more explicitly.

350108
An error message informing users that the same name cannot be configured for WINS name and WINS alias has been clarified.

344788
The show redundancy CLI command no longer sends DNS PTR queries to name servers.

351707
A problem that occasionally caused the show policy CLI command to return a spurious POLICY_INTERNAL_ERROR message has fixed.

351600
A problem that prevented MacOS 10.4 and 10.5 clients from copying files in multi-protocol namespaces via CIFS has been fixed.

344894
The ARX-2000 no longer gets stuck at the GRUB menu during the boot process.

Version 5.3.1

Release 5.3.1 included the following fixes and enhancements, also included in this release.

Features

ARX-VE Production Release

Release 5.3.1 introduced a production version of the new ARX Virtual Edition (VE) platform, which runs as a VM guest on hypervisor hardware. This is a software-only platform for the storage services of the ARX, with production-grade limits for maximum number of volumes, file-server shares, files, and so on. Release 5.3.0 was the trial version of the ARX-VE, which is also supported in the current release.

Minimum system requirements:

The ARX-VE requires the following resources from the hypervisor:

2 CPU cores, 64-bit

4 GB of memory

1 Virtual NIC (VNIC) interface

40 GB or more of disk space

These are defined in the OVF template. Please contact F5 technical support prior to making any change to the settings in the OVF template.

Converting from the trial version to the production version: Converting an ARX-VE running Release 5.3.1 from a trial version to a production version requires you to purchase an ARX-VE production license from F5 Networks. Clear the evaluation license and enable the production license. You will be warned to increase the memory allocated to the ARX-VE to 4GB, and to provision a second CPU core. You will then need to reload the ARX-VE instance.

The ARX-VE supports a single interface (a VNIC on its hypervisor host), which is used for management as well as client/server traffic. It differs from other ARX platforms in the following general ways:

The ARX-VE uses standard hypervisor clustering for redundancy. Therefore, none of the ARX-specific CLI commands or GUI operations for redundancy appear on the ARX-VE.

The ARX-VE does not support VLAN tagging. Its interface is only on VLAN 1, the default VLAN.

The ARX-VE can only be deployed in a single-arm network configuration, as described in the Site Planning manual.

The ARX-VE cannot support channels.

The ARX-VE does not have an out-of-band (OOB) management interface. You manage the ARX-VE with its in-band (VLAN) management IP on VLAN 1.

The ARX-VE does not manage its RAID array, so there are no RAID commands or operations in its management interfaces.

The ARX-VE system disk and metalog VMDK must be stored outside the VMhost if you want to use VMware high availability functionality. If VMware HA is required, the metalog VMDK must be stored on an NFS NAS, iSCSI SAN, or Fibre Channel SAN accessible by all members of the VMware cluster.

The ARX-VE does not support firmware upgrades.

The VMware console does not support copy and paste from outside applications, so you cannot copy an ARX running-config or global-config from an external file to the ARX-VE's CLI prompt. You can instead use the CLI copy command to upload a running-config and/or global-config file to the ARX, then use the run command to run the configuration commands in the ARX CLI. Alternatively, you can copy and paste using an SSH/telnet connection to the ARX's in-band IP address.

In addition, observe the following practices when operating the ARX-VE:

Do not use VMware Fault Tolerance in conjunction with ARX-VE.

Perform live migration of ARX-VE virtual machines (using VMware VMotion) only when the ARX-VE is idle or lightly loaded (e.g.,during off-hours). Live migration of ARX-VE while the virtual machine is processing traffic could produce unexpected results.

Similarly, in DRS environments, perform live migration of ARX-VE virtual machines (using VMware VMotion) only when the ARX-VE is idle or lightly loaded (e.g., during off-hours). Live migration of ARX-VE while the virtual machine is processing traffic could produce unexpected results. Disable automatic migrations by adjusting the VMware VMotion DRS Automation Level to Partially Automated, Manual or Disabled on a per-ARX-VE basis.

Fixes

Release 5.3.1 added the following fixes to the ARX:

348437
A problem with network mask handling that caused virtual services to fail to come online has been fixed.

349790
When a managed volume's metadata share was offline, thereby disabling the managed volume, the ARX Manager's Namespace screen spuriously indicated that the volume was healthy.

350049
A problem that caused core file creation due to a difference in the ARX-VE's handling of SMB signatures between the front end and the back end has been fixed.

Version 5.3.0

Release 5.3.0 included the following fixes and enhancements, also included in this release.

Features

ARX-VE

Release 5.3.0 supports the new ARX Virtual Edition (VE) platform, which runs as a VM guest on hypervisor hardware. This is a software-only platform for the storage services of the ARX, useful for demonstrations of ARX storage as well as for pre-staging for one of the ARX hardware platforms.

The ARX-VE supports a single interface (a VNIC on its hypervisor host), which is used for management as well as client/server traffic. It differs from other ARX platforms in the following general ways:

The ARX-VE uses standard hypervisor clustering for redundancy. Therefore, none of the ARX-specific CLI commands or GUI operations for redundancy appear on the ARX-VE.

The ARX-VE does not support VLAN tagging. Its interface is only on VLAN 1, the default VLAN.

The ARX-VE can only be deployed in a single-arm network configuration, as described in the Site Planning manual.

The ARX-VE cannot support channels.

The ARX-VE does not have an out-of-band (OOB) management interface. You manage the ARX-VE with its in-band (VLAN) management IP on VLAN 1.

The ARX-VE does not manage its RAID array, so there are no RAID commands or operations in its management interfaces.

The ARX-VE metalog VMDK must be stored outside the VMserver if you want to use VMware high availability functionality. If VMware HA is required, the metalog VMDK must be stored on an NFS NAS, iSCSI SAN, or Fibre Channel SAN accessible by all members of the VMware cluster.

The ARX-VE does not support firmware upgrades.

The VMware console does not support copy and paste from outside applications, so you cannot copy an ARX running-config or global-config from an external file to the ARX-VE's CLI prompt. You can instead use the CLI copy command to upload a running-config and/or global-config file to the ARX, then use the run command to run the configuration commands in the ARX CLI.

NOTE: You cannot apply upgrade releases or hotfix updates to this version of ARX-VE.

Fixes

Release 5.3.0 added the following fixes to the ARX:

347715
Executing the show exports command on a Windows filer that does not have Services For Unix installed no longer returns the 'STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_PATH' error message.

344533
The Temporary file attribute for files and directories now is ignored.

343426
A problem that prevented users from deleting directories from home drives when using Windows 7 and DFS has been fixed.

344644
Displaying the security for an NFS mount from a client no longer causes the ARX to show the security for the mount incorrectly as "none".

344119
A problem with TCP port allocation by the ARX that caused an NFS server to be unresponsive after ARX failover has been fixed.

343546
A problem in the ARX HA functionality that prevented clients from accessing mounted directories has been fixed.

345775
Windows 2008 R2 snapshots no longer fail when the Windows filer has more than 20 mount points.

343813, 347086
Changing a metadata share for an existing managed volume no longer causes an unexpected exit of the ARX GUI.

Version 5.2.2

This was a Maintenance Release for the 5.02.nnn series of software releases. It did not include any new features or enhancements. It contained the following fixes:

371717
A problem that caused file history queries to return no files in the report has been fixed.

366235, 367033, 368978
A problem that caused storage resources to become inaccessible to users has been corrected by changing the handling of timeouts in the ARX's path caching functionality.

367301
A problem that caused NFS TCP connections to back end filers to get stuck in the "Retrying" state, preventing access to the back end file systems, has been fixed.

369794, 368478, 369209
An internal locking problem was corrected in a rarely encountered error path. Prior to this correction, if the error path was triggered, tasks within the ARX software could block indefinitely, leading to severely degraded user access to ARX-virtualized file systems.

366051
A metadata database problem that caused DNAS forced recoveries to occur has been fixed.

346213, 364071, 365052
Adding user security through the VIP now works correctly, after a problem involving source ID mapping and domain strings was fixed.

362584
A problem with report file permissions set by the ARX GUI that prevented such report files from being copied off of the ARX using the CLI has been fixed.

364300
The timeout for connecting to a domain controller, for NTLM/NTLMv2 authentication when constrained delegation is used, has been increased from 10-20ms to about 10 seconds. This will allow the authentication mechanisms to work as expected when ARX is configured with domain controllers that are slower than normal.

363799
Share-farms that are configured to constrain directories below a depth greater than 1 now behave correctly. Previously, constraints below a depth of 1 did not work.

364211
A problem in which multiple place-rules targeted the same share-farm and caused the removal of each other's pending directory promotes has been fixed.

364364
Using the quorum-disk command with the spn argument no longer changes the user's domain to that of the quorum disk SPN domain.

359924
A problem that caused snapshots to fail on Windows 2003 filers due to erroneous handling of the drive letter and drive type has been fixed.

363194
A problem in the software upgrade process that prevented the show policy command from displaying policy rules after the upgrade has been fixed.

361295
A problem that caused the mounting of a TCP port using NFS v3 to fail has been fixed.

361102
location broker cores.

358916
Remove share failed, dncd failed assert.

361975, 363221
A problem that caused the NSM to generate core files due to a backend connection aging out while an uncleared pending transaction was present has been fixed.

359696
File history queries are no longer limited to 20,480 files.

360165
A problem that caused share import reports with more than 1,000 entries to be incomplete has been fixed.

364320
File tracking reports no longer fail when initiated after another file tracking report that had been canceled before being able to complete.

363758
Internal timing errors that caused stale NFS file handles to occur during du and ls operations have been corrected.

357453
A problem that caused managed volume snapshots to be in a permanent "requested" state following an extended period of filer downtime has been fixed.

352209
The prompt that appears upon execution of the nsck destage and nsck rebuild commands now requires you to type an explict response, either yes or no. Previously, this prompt was not clear.

357204
A problem that caused the NSM to produce a core file when the path cache was enabled has been fixed.

358149
A case mismatch issue which caused a core file to be created when the case of the path for a subshare export did not match the case of the path for the backend share has been fixed.

357889
A problem that caused Active Directory users to be locked out of the ARX after a single failed login attempt has been fixed.

357784
A case mismatch issue that prevented the removal of CIFS shares and generated a core file has been fixed.

348881
Portable Apple devices (such as the iPad and iPhone) could not access ARX shares with the FileBrowser and NetPortal apps.

354569, 357049
An SNMP get operation sometimes caused the ARX software to fail, produce a core-memory file, and reboot. The failure occurred only if there was at least one CIFS-authentication failure in the database, the failure was one of a small set of failures, and CIFS-authentication statistics were included in the returned data.

351863, 349196, 349933
NSM processors on the ARX-4000 sometimes failed to boot after an upgrade to 5.2.0 (or later) firmware. This was only an issue on an ARX-4000 in a redundant pair. Now the processors boot successfully after a firmware upgrade.

356571
ARX performance was slower than it should have been in lossy networks. When network retransmits occurred due to external network issues, the retransmit algorithm caused extra time to be lost. The retransmit algorithm has been improved so that it stops exacerbating ARX-performance problems in lossy networks.

351944
Some upgrades of redundant pairs failed with an error on the upgraded (backup) peer, visible in the show redundancy output. The error prevented the redundant pair from forming. The error cleared when both peers were upgraded. Now, the error no longer occurs on upgrade.

349176
Erroneous syslog messages are no longer generated when navigating a filer for which streams are disabled.

347800
Log messages related to the mounting and connection of quorum disks have been improved to facilitate the troubleshooting process when access to the quorum disk is interrupted.

346275
Displaying chassis information using the GUI sometimes displayed Disk Status as Good when the actual status was, in fact, Degraded. The criteria used to determine Disk Status has been modified to characterize that status more accurately as Optimal or Degraded.

349751
The ARX supports the creation of VLAN IDs ranging from 1 to 4009, and now provides adequate warning against creating a VLAN with an ID higher than that.

351432
Snapshots no longer lock up on ARX-6000s when filer subshares and SID translation are enabled.

341077, 344350, 348438
The "no redundancy protocol" CLI command now removes only external member ports from the private VLAN, and will not remove the internal ports assigned to that VLAN. In addition, the layer 2 software has been changed so that any attempt to delete the private VLAN is rejected. Also, the layer 2 software now includes additional instrumentation for diagnosing failures with IPC timeouts on SCM to NSM internal ports.

347303, 345679
A problem that occurred when an attempt to mount a CIFS quorum disk failed has been fixed, and the corresponding logging has been improved to translate the CIFS error/status code to a text string.

340643, 35742
The ARX now sends out all varbinds for all SNMP traps.

350295
A problem that caused firmware mismatch error messages to be displayed even after a successful firmware upgrade has been fixed.

345669
A problem that caused OMDB transactions to stay open for extended periods of time has been fixed.

342877
When executing the quorum disk command for CIFS and using the optional spn argument, it is no longer necessary to capitalize the fully-qualified domain name.

38523
The collect diag-info command now collects state information and core files correctly for NFS.

342161
Previously, adding a tagged VLAN using the vlan-tag CLI command erroneously added an untagged VLAN entry using the same VLAN ID to the running configuration as well. This has been corrected.

348086
Auto-migration now works correctly when the no volume scan option is used with the place rule.

348362
A problem that caused error messages to indicate that SMB signing was not enabled, when, in fact, it was, has been fixed.

345456
The size limit of the banner.txt file has been increased from 768 B to 1.5 kB.

Version 5.2.0

Release 5.2.0 included the following fixes and enhancements, also included in this release.

Features

Release 5.2.0 contained several supportability enhancements, CIFS enhancements and some other options designed to take advantage of popular file-server features. These are all described in the subsections below.

CIFS Service Enhancements

Release 5.2.0 contains several enhancements for CIFS front-end services. These are designed to tighten security and to improve ease-of-use for administrators.

Constrained Delegation

An ARX-CIFS service delegates its storage services to the filers behind it. Release 5.2.0 supports constrained delegation, so that you can constrain the CIFS service to delegate only to the file servers it uses. (Former software releases allowed the ARX to delegate its services to any filer.) If you use constrained delegation, the namespace behind the service no longer requires an NTLM-authentication server to support NTLM or NTLMv2, and you no-longer need to install an ARX Secure Agent (ASA) on any of the CIFS service's DCs.

Constrained delegation is only possible for a domain if the Domain's functional level is Windows 2003 or later.

A domain administrator can upgrade an ARX-CIFS service to constrained delegation at a Windows Domain Controller (DC). On the DC, the administrator invokes the Active Directory Users and Computers application, finds the machine account for the ARX service, trusts the account for "delegation to specified services only," and identifies all of the CIFS servers behind the ARX. On the ARX, the probe delegate-to command provides a list of all CIFS servers behind a particular ARX service, and confirms that they are properly configured at the DC.

After upgrading a CIFS service to use constrained delegation, it is possible for the service to require a configuration change. Refer to Required Configuration Changes for instructions.

NOTE: Constrained delegation is more secure than unconstrained delegation, and requires that all of the CIFS service's filers be joined to the same Windows domain as the CIFS service itself. Also, all of the filers must support Kerberos authentication.

SMB Signatures

ARX CIFS services and namespaces can now support SMB signing. SMB signing is the process of adding digital signatures to every Server Message Block (SMB) between a CIFS server and its clients. This protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, but creates a performance penalty.

If you implement SMB signing at your site, the ARX can support it as needed. You can enable SMB signing between CIFS clients and one of your CIFS services, and you can enable SMB signing between an ARX namespace and all of its filers.

Active-Directory Site Awareness

The ARX software uses its Active-Directory (AD) site to calculate its preferred Domain Controllers (DCs). In large AD deployments with multiple sites, the AD administrator can identify the sites and assign DCs and subnets to each site. The AD administrator performs this site configuration externally, on a DC. When the ARX automatically discovers the AD configuration (with the active-directory update seed-domain CLI command, or its GUI equivalent), it "prefers" DCs in the same site as its proxy-IP subnet. This removes the administrative burden of manually setting DC preferences on the ARX.

The subnet for the proxy-IP addresses must be assigned to an AD site for the automatic discovery to function properly. You assign a subnet to an AD site at the DC. Use the show ip proxy-addresses CLI command to find the subnet for your proxy-IP addresses.

CIFS-Subshare Enhancements

This release includes several enhancements for the CIFS subshare feature. A CIFS subshare is any CIFS share that exists in the directory tree of an imported CIFS share. Given the correct configuration, a client connecting to an ARX subshare also connects directly to the corresponding file-server subshare, instead of connecting to the import share above it. This ensures that the file server uses the subshare ACL instead of the root-share ACL.

This release enhances the subshare feature by making it easier to manage, especially in large configurations:

Subshare replication between back-end filers is now automatic, and no-longer requires the replicate flag in the filer subshare operation.

Former releases replicated all subshares discovered on the first-imported share. The ARX ignored any subshares on the second or subsequent imported shares. This release discovers all subshares on all back-end shares, and fully replicates them.

Formerly, subshare replication generated new share names in the format, "_acopia_native-name_id$," where the native-name was the name of the subshare that was being duplicated. Now the ARX only generates these names when a naming collision makes it necessary. In most cases, the native-name is duplicated on all back-end shares.

The new sync subshares from-namespace operation synchronizes all filer subshares behind a volume and then exports them through a CIFS service. This is done with a single CLI command or GUI operation.

A reverse operation, sync subshares from-service, takes all subshare definitions from a front-end CIFS service and replicates them on all the filers behind it. This provides a method for repairing a front-end subshare that is not fully backed by its back-end counterparts.

When you export a filer subshare, the ARX automatically replicates all subshare and ACL information on all required back-end subshares.

Two former CLI commands, sync shares and cifs export-subshares, are now obsolete. They have been removed from the CLI, and their GUI counterparts have been adapted to the new operations.

In releases prior to 5.2.0, in ARX Manager, there was a Discover button for subshares in the Create Virtual Service Wizard. In 5.2.0, the subshare "discovery" mechanism was changed/enhanced to include an asynchronous operation that changes the back-end file server configuration by adding subshares to any shares that don't include them already. This enhancement was deemed too heavy to be done as part of a wizard, so the button was removed. The new work flow is to create your virtual service, then edit your managed volume, click the share tab, and click the Sync button. This will sync all back-end subshares and export the sub-shares out the virtual service.

Managed-Volume Shares Dedicated to Snapshot Repositories

The 5.2.0 release now supports replica-snapshot shares in managed volumes. A replica-snapshot share is a constantly-updated duplicate of one of the volume's standard shares. You use standard file-server-replication tools to copy the primary share's files to the replica-snapshot share, then the managed volume can snapshot the data at the replica-snapshot share. This allows you to keep a much smaller number of snapshots on the primary share. The managed volume's CIFS clients can access these snapshots through standard means (such as the "Previous Versions" tab in some Windows releases).

Disaster-Recovery (DR) Support for ARX Sites

A redundant pair of ARXes, called an ARX cluster, can now be used as a backup for an ARX cluster at a primary site. This feature is designed for sites where the back-end file servers independently synchronize data between the two sites. To prepare an ARX cluster for a disaster, you can copy the ARX's global configuration to its backup cluster on a regular schedule, so that the backup cluster always has an updated copy of the active cluster's configuration. In the event of a disaster at the active site, an administrator at the backup site can load and activate the configuration there. ARX clients can then connect to their services and storage at the backup site. The client-side names of all services and shares remain consistent after the site failover.

You can also fail over individual services from one site to another, so that some services run on one ARX cluster and other services run on the second cluster.

Active-Directory Authentication for ARX Administrators

ARX administrators can now use their Windows credentials to log into the CLI or GUI. This requires some minimal configuration to provide one or more Windows groups (such as "Domain Admins") with administrative privileges on the ARX, and to allow Active-Directory authentication into various access points (such as SSH for the CLI or HTTPS for the GUI). Use the authentication CLI command to allow AD authentication, and use the group CLI command to start provisioning a Windows group for ARX administration. For detailed instructions on these commands, refer to the CLI Reference.

Auto-Diagnostics

This release also contains the auto-diagnostics feature, which can regularly collect usage statistics from your ARX and send them (through E-mail, encrypted) to F5 Support. The engineers at F5 Support can analyze this data over time, watching for trends and, if necessary, contacting you about preventative actions. The feature is recommended, but it is optional; you can use the gbl-mode auto-diagnostics command (or its GUI equivalent) to activate the feature.

More Logs in "collect state" Payload

The collect state command (and its GUI equivalent) now includes important log files to aid with problem diagnosis, but still produces a zip file that is small enough to be portable. The collect state file requires a much shorter upload time than the zip file from collect all or collect diag-info. You can use collect state for an initial diagnosis, and possibly follow up with a later collect all if further diagnosis is required.

ARX API

Release 5.2.0 supports a SOAP-based API for monitoring ARX configuration and file changes in its managed volumes. You can use third-party software that acts as a client for this API.

Fixes

Release 5.2.0 included the following fixes, which are also included in this release:

350698
A problem that caused share farms to be duplicated upon creation has been fixed.

350942
A problem that prevented policies from being viewed or changed after upgrading the ARX software to Release 5.2 or higher has been fixed.

343205, 348017
Domain join operations failed when the ARX could not find a domain controller.

351078, 351352
Clients using Mac OSX 10.4.11 now can copy files via their mapped drives while using the GUI finder without receiving an error.

The problem had been caused by client PIDs being sent to the filer with values of 0 rather than with their correct values.

346550
File pathnames now can be renamed to consist of more than 256 characters. previously, pathnames longer than 256 characters in length caused the ARX session to terminate unexpectedly.

348378
File tracking archive searches no longer hang and cause OMDB transactions to be held open for extended periods of time.

33482
A customer requested we add Sync Share functionality to the ARX Manager. You can locate this functionality now in the ARX Manager on the Managed Volumes Details Share Tab, with the Sync Shares button.

28288
Previously, there were policy free space issues after a failover. The event processor now waits for the volume to be up and getting free space before events are processed.

32081
Automatic Volume Sizing (AVS) was running too slow. When Automatic Volume Sizing was disabled, the AVS_NEAR_MAX_CAPACITY trap would trigger too early on small capacity volumes. It now traps when there is either 10 percent or 2M files free in the volume, whichever is smaller

38802
The ARX lost contact with a back-end CIFS file server and when the ARX lost contact with the file server, it locked out all user access to all volumes/shares. This issue was fixed by adjusting the fault injection timeout path and updating the setup script to create shares more quickly.

38319
After removing the smtp configuration, the box continued to send emails. This has been fixed in the software by reissuing some commands, including the exit command.

39112
The software raised fan failure traps as a result of running a collect. This was remedied with a simple FPGA fix.

338355
Constrained Delegation on the ARX did not function for multiple-tier authentications where an SFTP server was tier 1. That is, if an SFTP server delegated to the ARX-CIFS service, and the ARX-CIFS service in turn delegated to a CIFS server behind it, the SFTP clients could not get directory listings.

32938, 39223
If you have a router between the metadata file and the ARX, its possible that the ARX will receive an an ICMP unreachable from the router causing a service interruption(DNAS crashing and restarting). The ARX now handles ICMP unreachable from NFS metadata filers or routers in between.

37134
By default, Windows 2008 R2 servers require 128-bit encryption for their NTLM SSP sessions. This encryption was not supported for filers behind the ARX. Now the ARX supports 128-bit encryption for NTLM SSP sessions.

33473
Samba-based filers are implemented without "Domain Admin" privilege configured within the proxy-user. The samba server privilege probe now verifies that the proxy user is properly mapped to root.

31355
The source IP in a message should be the ARX proxy-IP address, but for some reason, it's was the file server's IP. The fix was to correctly log the ARX proxy-IP address as the source IP address in the log message (instead of whatever information was left over in the buffer).

38656
The interface was not removed from the vlan that had just been deleted. The code now removes the dangling interface.

337370
The first issue is that it is possible to re-scan directories that make the files scanned counter larger than the total number of files in the volume. If that happens, we no longer display the % complete. The second issue is that the queue counters (first time migrates and the re queued migrates) used to get out of sync, causing the first time migrates to become 4294967295, this no longer happens.

38034
The ARX previously considered a domain controller (DC) in another Active-Directory forest to be "unusable" if it had a particular security setting. (This status appeared in the output of the show active-directory status CLI command, or its GUI equivalent.) The DC security setting was "Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) clients", set to require 128 bit encryption. Now, you can enable this security setting on a Windows 2003+ DC in another forest and the ARX recognizes it as useable.

34630, 31831
All operations are now queued and executed asynchronously. Furthermore, TCMD does not reorder operations and always insert new operations at the end of the programming queue.

37364
An NSM cored after a customer failed over its peer. This was due to a rare race condition and we implemented a solid reference counting scheme for this affected object.

38007
We added a configurable parameter (maxResilverMinutes) to extend the timeout used for re silvering NVRAM to its peer for hardware redundancy.

338164
A customer experienced repeated cores over a period of times. Now the code requires a new transaction to be used in a retry, at which point a new DB connection is established.

38306,32050
Previously, no warning was provided when a reload was issued and startup-config was deleted. One is now provided.

37706
An ARX-4000 became unresponsive until it was rebooted and logging failed. This was fixed by a firmware upgrade for mid-plane raid controllers.

36838show firmware upgrade now indicates the correct status messages.

32642
After issuing a reset, the box took too long to respond to pings. The fix was to make the raid status reporting software do the right thing when one of the physical raid drives is either physically missing or behaving as if it is physically missing.

336330
Due to an atypical configuration, a customer experienced a dual NSM core when restarting the ARX Manager. The fix consisted of cleaning up state when a user removes a file server whose connection is down. Previously, this left over state prevented a user from reusing the IP address.

28839,25438,36692,38412
The ARX had HA synchronization issues and now the ARX now has improved HA capabilities.

37905
There was a display issue with show channel stats with Good Oversize Frames = 0. Now you can see Good Oversize Frames value increase as you send jumbo frames.

37665
The ARX-4000 display is counting frames that have a size between 1519 and 1521 bytes in the 1522-2047 bucket. The display correctly counts frames in the 1522-2017 range.

337510
A tier1 rule got reset because it could not put a notification on the notification queue. The notification was the result of a rename. Renames will no longer cause the rule to reset.

37454
A customer experienced errors in the show system status output due to incorrect CPU data. The code now uses CPU scaling and CPU data now displays correctly.

37768
A policy appeared to be aborted. The code has been fixed so that we will not exempt internal admin client connections from tearing down file server connections/sessions. As long as policy releases all the connections, the file server sessions should get refreshed and any credential change in the back end should take effect. In addition, there is a new option to terminate all outbound file server connections used by the internal admin service.

38277
The ARX filer-subshares feature sometimes creates shares on back-end file servers that begin with the prefix "_acopia_". Such share names have a well-defined syntax, and the ARX assumes that it is free to manipulate these shares. With this fix, the ARX is now more robust in its handling of "_acopia_" shares that do not follow the correct syntax (for example, shares created manually by a curious and inquisitive admin user). F5 strongly discourages manual creation of back-end shares whose names begin with the string "_acopia_".

38193
In some cases, a busy file server and a busy ARX can cause the login process from the ARX to the file server to be altered - changing the timing of messages. In some rare cases, when authorization fails on the first attempt to the file server, the NSM that initiated the login would crash. This condition is now handled and the second authorization attempt will proceed normally.

21759, 36546
There were issues found with parent rename and directory renaming. Windows file servers will not allow the manipulation of directories that look like DOS device names (for example: COM1, LPT1, AUX). Unfortunately, Windows doesn't prevent the creation of such directory names. The ARX has to prevent the creation of directory names that would cause offense on file severs that won't accept them. These restrictions are enforced dynamically, and only happen if there are Windows filers in the volume. If a pathname includes a DOS device name as a pathname component, files/directories underneath that directory cannot be placed or migrated to a Windows file server. Also, a rename that would create such a pathname on a Windows file server is not allowed. Additionally, if such a name is discovered to exist on a Windows filer, the ARX will not import it. sync/import/inconsistency reports note the reserved names when they are encountered. Client-initiated proxy operations fail with ACCESS_DENIED and a log message. The corrective action is to rename the directory to something acceptable.

30803
The number of supported attach points was not clearly define or enforced. We now count and enforce the maximum number of attach points that are allowed to be configured. Second, we now restrict the length of the front-end and back-end paths. This reduces memory consumption.

336604
A customer was reloading the primary switch in an HA pair to recover from an NSM core. During the shutdown, the secondary switch lost access to the quorum disk. This caused the secondary switch to reboot per design because it cannot access the quorum and does not have heartbeat from the primary. The code has been fixed to keep the switch from losing access to the quorum disk.

36858
A customer experienced CPU spikes and a performance degradation due to subtree notify changes. We now have a default ignore-subtree-flag setting that fixes this issue.

337441
The ACLs are not migrated when tiering data to T2. We now treat oversize ACLs correctly.

36642
A customer experienced a state where no "cifs auth stats" information could be retrieved with an snmp get command. Code changes were made to provide this information.

37357
Syslog messages were coming every 5 seconds instead of once. Now we only report if the state has changed.

37854
When doing a show global server, the WINS aliases did not appear. Now the code displays the WINs aliases.

37858, 36483, 37793
A customer experienced an NSM core. We modified the NSM watchdog mechanism to improve our chances to diagnose these types of issues.

38312
A user outage was caused by a share import. The code has been fixed so this won't happen.

37787
When a share was enabled for the first time, from the GUI or CLI, and that share had no free space, it used to return an error that needed to be either more clear or changed entirely. This error message has been updated and known results of the write test be returned to the user.

38018
A customer experienced a failover event that took 15 minutes for the VIPs on switch A to become accessible. Whereas the two VIPs on switch B are accessible instantly. This was due to a MAC addressing issue and this issue has been fixed.

37046
Some clients who ran Excel macros at the end of the day said that the macros took a lot longer to complete than expected. We have fixed the software to no longer require OMDB access and no longer require a listener.

38388
The software has been enhanced to include a new feature on the import report. When an import fails, for "Pathname not found during lookup" an entry now displays the actual path name.

36676
We have enhanced the software to help define disaster recovery terms more clearly. We removed the "force" argument from the "remove-share nomigrate' command. We now say "remove-share offline" instead of "remove-share nomigrate force". For the global namespace volume share "no filer" command the "force" argument has been changed to "offline." And lastly, for the global namespace volume, the optional "force" argument was also changed to offline.

38175
The ARX Manager became inaccessible after a core. The software has been fixed to restart automatically.

37595
On a customer cluster, the ARX Manager is very slow to respond to listing request. We have restructured the way we store the policy configuration information in the ARX so that we can more efficiently retrieve the information when the CLI or GUI request it.

35295
The ARX did not allow RADIUS authentication of users when RADIUS network device filters were turned on. We made fixes to the radius client code on the switch and the NAS-IP-Address is now returned.

37025
When "haPairQDiskFreespaceWarningRaise" trap was created, it did not list in "show health". The code has been fixed to display this trap under show health.

37051
The code was enhanced to move this message to LOG_DEBUG: "Could not properly determine the "active LIP" PIP; the SCM LIP address defaults to INADDR_ANY"

339599
The ARX Manager has been enhanced to allow setting the WinRM port. This setting is now configurable from the File Server Add page or when you configure managed volumes using the wizard.

36121
Occasionally, a shadow copy had failed during target volume rebuild. We change the way that the shadow volume receiver decides database rebuild by making the shadow volume receiver less sensitive to a single not found error.

37460
The ARX Manager now displays the Place Rules report on the Place Rules Details page Current Scan Stats and Last Scan Stats.

37334
Polling to a configured time server would continuously fail transmit and/or receive if it was configured on the ARX prior to an ARX network interface change. This sometimes happen when executing a saved running-config script, where numerous configuration commands are executed in rapid succession. The ntpd daemon was modified to automatically reconfigure its association with a time server after a maximum number of transmit/receive failures.

32573
When a back-end share filled up behind a managed volume, and one of its CIFS clients attempted to change permissions on one of that share's directories, all of that managed volume's CIFS sessions hung. An administrator needed to increase the size of the share (or, in some cases, the NetApp quota) to restore CIFS service to the managed volume.

The ARX now detects disk-full conditions on its back-end filers, blocks client operations that could result in a widespread loss of service, and allows CIFS clients to resolve the problem by removing files. The ARX also sends SNMP traps to alert you of any directories or shares that are adversely affected by an out-of-space share. (See the SNMP Reference for full documentation on all SNMP traps.)

38955
When an SNMP trap raises an alarm condition, the alarm appears in the output of the show health CLI command until it is cleared by another trap. In previous releases, there was no manual method for clearing these alarms. Release 5.2.0 introduced the clear health CLI command for this purpose.

37639
In a filename fileset, recursion did not function when matching directory paths.

37261
Snapshot delete operations on NetApp filers now retry when the snapshot is busy due to a snapmirror operation.

336775
The /acopia/var/log/raidupgrade.log file now includes an entry for each time that the upgrade script was executed.

37006
A problem that caused user-defined login banners set from a file to not survive reboots has been fixed.

341565
An internal error that caused errors accessing data on managed volumes, along with insufficient resource error messages, has been fixed.

341796
A problem that caused age-based filesets to be displayed incorrectly has been fixed.

36139
An internal problem that caused the creation of a core file has been fixed.

339446
Many attempts to find files across directories with very large numbers of files no longer result in stranded or unresolved searches.

38975340644
An issue in which performance degradation was caused by an excess of notification messages when a volume was accessed has been fixed.

34512
A background process configures all attach points (in presentation, or direct, volumes) after a failover. In a system with a large number of attach points, this sometimes required several minutes. If another failover occurred before the process was finished, that failover sometimes required nearly one hour to complete. This fix dramatically increases the speed of attach-point configuration and failovers: the same configuration now takes approximately 1 minute.

Version 5.1.9

This was a Maintenance Release for the 5.01.nnn series of software releases. It did not include any new features or enhancements. It contained the following fixes:

362719
A result of null during an LDAP search no longer causes a core file to be generated.

352207
A problem that caused storage jobs to pause indefinitely following the execution of a cancel import command has been fixed. The problem was caused by an internal import lock that was not being released at the appropriate time.

352216
Executing the nsck destage or nsck rebuild command now lists the affected services much more rapidly than before. Previously, it took a very long time for these commands to list all of the affected services before returning a prompt for the user to confirm the action.

354210
The no inline-notify command now affects policy rule behavior only when the rule's schedule executes, and not when a volume pause policy schedule executes.

349433
Need ability to gain disk/raid/ps diagnostic data without going to the shell

355165
Previously, a TCP connection could not be established between the active ARX and backup ARX in an HA pair when each ARX had a local peer core in the Failed state. This has been fixed.

345773
When a managed volume imported its shares using NFSv2, some files and directories were occasionally missed. The import succeeded, but the missed files/directories appeared as inconsistencies. Now an NFSv2 import captures all back-end files reliably.

347062
Back-end snapshots went to the wrong NetApp volume when the NetApp volume met the following criteria:

it had a physical path that was different from its "masqueraded" NFS-export path,

the "masqueraded" path matched the path of a different physical volume,

the "masqueraded" path started with "/vol", and

the "masqueraded" path was imported into an ARX volume that supports snapshots.

Now the ARX takes snapshots of the correct (physical) NetApp path.

352085
At some customer installations, two Microsoft Windows Server 2003 hot fixes (KB2478971 and KB2478960) were causing the ARX to mark the server's shares as "offline."

348799, 39560, 348979
Previously, when an NTLM server was removed while thousands of NAT rule actions were installed and in the initial state, the NSM watchdog could expire because the removal of the rules took longer than the watchdog allowed. Now, the watchdog continues to be serviced while the removal of NAT rule actions completes.

351976
A rare race condition between a CIFS-client disconnect and an internal "cancel- search" command could potentially cause a software failure. The software failure produced a core-memory file. The race condition has been corrected.

352236
Many CIFS clients were unable to connect to ARX storage during failovers and failbacks between NSM cores. The client outages sometimes lasted for several minutes. This fix addresses issues in the control plane that contributed to the outages.

345894
When a switch replacement in a redundant pair repeatedly failed, clients had difficulty accessing the active ARX's front-end services.

352600
The Network Services Module no longer generates a core file when bad server message blocks are received from the network.

351553, 350947
A problem in the NSMs memory allocation could cause the NSM to be shut down by the control plane. This has been fixed by ensuring that the internal watchdog is serviced in the memory heap management routines.

348130
Temp files that are created in /acopia/reports/tmp during report copy operations now are deleted properly following execution, and no longer prevent the generation of new reports.

346467
A problem that caused slow performance and WORKSLOW messages to be displayed has been fixed.

347298, 347192, 348800, 350191, 350964
The Network Services Module could generate core files when it receives multiple client requests that need to be sent to a filer, but the authorization credentials to that filer generate a failure (for example, a LOGON_FAILURE). This issue has been corrected.

343499
Some operations (in particular metadata migration) failed to use the configured SPN as they should have. This prevented the operations from working when using a clustered Windows file server. This has been fixed to use the configured SPN.

344676, 342783
This fix involves changes made to assure Db-scope garbage collection is set to every 10,000 transactions after creating a new database.

345278
A problem in which a report of space running out on one share caused loss of access to other virtual IP addresses and exports has been fixed.

341991, 342263, 343348
NSM cored due to taking too long when reassembling a long packet when there are many fragments. This issue has been addressed and fixed.

340084
When a presentation (or direct) volume has an attach point into a managed volume with snapshots, the "~snapshot" directory was not always visible in the attach point. This only occurred if the attach point attached to one of the managed volume's subdirectories. For example, suppose a presentation volume, "/pvol", attaches one of its directories ("/pvol/attachDir") to a managed volume, "/mvol", at "/mvol/dir1/dir2." A client's directory listing of "/pvol/attachDir" did not include a "~snapshots" directory before this fix; now it does.

347104
When a CIFS client's password expired in the middle of a connection to an ARX service, the ARX network software failed and created a core-memory file.

346290
The show file-history archive ... contents operation failed for volumes with very large numbers of files (20 million or more).

347958
When a file migrates to the ARX Cloud Extender (ARX-CE), the ARX-CE compresses the file and sets its "sparse file" attribute. Formerly, a file that migrated to the ARX-CE, then to an EMC Celerra, and back to the ARX-CE would be corrupted on the final migration. This is a file-server issue, caused by different uses of the "sparse file" attribute. Now the ARX works around this issue, so this migration path does not corrupt files.

Version 5.1.7

Release 5.1.7 included the following fixes, also included in this release:

345188
In environments with Active Directory contents comprising hundreds of thousands of user accounts, the v5.1.7 HF2 Secure Agent sometimes failed to scan the entire user database, resulting in some users failing authentication. This has been addressed by changing the Secure Agent's default timeout to 60 minutes, allowing more time for the user database to be read.

340252
A customer experienced a problem after performing a "shutdown" as part of DR test. When the box was powered back up, there was an error with the object manager database (which was then renamed), and the box came up without a configuration. This problem has been fixed.

336577
A customer's performance data showed that the find_first2 requests seem to be up to 40X slower than the file server response time. The software has been fixed and performance has been significantly improved.

39574
An NSM crash could happen in cases where there are connectivity/networking issues with a domain controller. While waiting for an authorization response from the control plane, the back-end file sever could tear down the TCP connection, causing memory corruption when the domain controller finally responds. Now, the NSM detects and corrects this situation to properly return an error to the client.

337992
Under load, a CIFS client may issue multiple close requests to close a file (since there can be a delay in the response to the first close). When this happens, it was possible for the NSM to crash upon receipt of the response to the second close request since the NSM would access a freed object. This situation has been fixed to account for this possibility.

340062
A customer experienced an NSM core. We fixed the assumption that the transaction2 operation responses always come from the file server. Transaction2 operation responses also come from the control plane. This log parameter mismatch was fixed.

338421, 38914, 39044, 337650, 339138
Under heavy load, it was possible for the NSM periodic cleanup functions to be starved and not run to completion and return filer connections that have gone down to the free pool. This could cause the NSM to run out of connections and be unable to service more clients. The periodic cleanup functions were changed so that this situation no longer happens.

336778
There was a corner case where DNAS and the NSM lost communications of the DT message path and the NSM began to reconnect. In the meantime, the NSM was still processing NFS requests and attempted to send a lookup to DNAS, which failed. As part of the cleanup processing there was an attempt to release a DT message that was never allocated. This resulted in the NSM coring. We now check that the DT message path is in the connected stated before attempting release any DT resources.

339051
A customer added an NFS list and experienced a core. This was fixed by fixing a lock around a call record.

339678
When an NFSv2 client used the chmod, chown, or chgrp command on an ARX-volume directory, future ls -l commands erroneously showed a time stamp of December 31, 1969. The time-stamp display issue has been corrected in this release.

39626
Shortly after a failover, the ls command hung in one of the ARX's NFS exports. This was due to a rare race condition in one of the network processors. The race condition is resolved in this release.

338082, 338250
A customer experienced a core because a file request timed-out. Now we do an extra look up for the object and rely on the file server response and not the object for the valid response.

338546
A customer experienced a frequent pop up message concerning ARX Secure Agent. This was caused by a race-condition in the code between use of an object and freeing the object and this conflict has been fixed.

39291
Database (DB) access through an ARX-CIFS volume failed when several DB-access commands were run in a macro. The ARX volume sometimes returned a "Disk or Network Error" message to the CIFS client running the macro.

337502
An NSM crash could occur during network outages - specifically when back-end file servers tear down TCP connections to the ARX. This was fixed by more properly handling internal objects when this happens and not cause memory corruption in the NSM.

35763
If an NFS client issued a /bin/ln command in a direct (or presentation) volume, the ARX volume sometimes responded with a spurious ESTALE error.

337205
Previously, the client never cached any directory information, so it was forced to always run ls to ask the ARX for all the information. Using ls would always appear to be uniformly slow. A user would not see this with NFS clients & servers, since there is always some locality of reference. Now, repeated references to the same directories can be satisfied (almost) completely from the client's local directory cache, so it is much faster.

39655
In NFS, a duplicate request sent by a client can, in very rare cases, receive two different replies from the file server: the first response yielding an error and the second response yielding a success. The NSM did not deal with this sequence properly (the verifiers did not match), which caused a crash. The ARX now handles this situation properly.

37422, 37992
During an upgrade, a virtual server hung in the starting state until browsing was disabled and then the global server went to enabled. Browsing could then be enabled again without incident. Now the volumes are enabled and assigned to an instance, which fixes this problem.

37610
When trying to setup a trust between two domains, a customer got errors back that one of the DCs are offline, while the AD status shows them online. The ARX now checks the forest function level from any reachable DC and it only checks in the forest-trust configuration (Windows Active Directory ensures that only Windows 2003/Windows 2008 servers are used as DCs, checks to see if the forest function level is 2003 or above, and the forest function level can NOT be downgraded.

38789, 38233, 39336, and 39818
The ARX failed to reboot and fail over after an internal-disk (RAID) failure.

39817
A problem that caused filename collisions during the use of the nsck rebuild CLI command has been fixed.

336521
During a forest-to-forest trust configuration the Win2K8 R2 DC was not accepted. This is now fixed, but you must not configure the forest trust, but instead configure the kerberos-auto-realm-transversal.

37048, 337568
The active-directory alias operation failed for an ARX VIP unless the VIP's CIFS service was joined the "COMPUTERS" OU.

336269, 35475, 342748
An NSM core happened due to a double free of a presto packet in an NFS path coupled with a network outage,which resulted in a buffer corruption. The NSM can now send traffic to a file server in this situation without corrupting the buffer.

337442
A customer experienced an NSM core on an HA pair, for twice on each, and a total of 4 times. We no longer process TCP ACKs for RON packets which have not finished being transmitted.

341263, 341478, 341975, 342147
An internal problem that caused the creation of a core file has been fixed.

336768
Two new CIFS shares were added, one to the /data volume and one to the /data directory, which resulted in a core. The boxes ping-ponged until they reached the bounce limit. This was caused by a piece of code that was used to protect us from a volume name of "/". We now double check for the volume name and avoid this issue.

Version 5.1.5

Release 5.1.5 included the following fixes, also included in this release:

37677, 336690
Previously, when the "count" form of "ip proxy-address" was used after the hardware was set up, then the resultant EIP records were delivered in non-ascending order of EIP address. If the EIPs are processed out of order, then the LIPs for XIPLIP assignments were also out of order (and incorrect). The code has been modified to so that any out-of-order processing of EIP listener events won't cause any problems.

38708
Previously, when the Shadow Copy Rule Edit page was accessed, the Publishing Mode drop-down was set to "Individual" regardless of the active shadow copy rule configuration on the ARX. The Publishing Mode drop-down box now sticks and matches the global-config.

38454
The Prune Target check box in the GUI's Edit Shadow-Copy Rule screen was persistently checked. If the prune-target feature was disabled previously, either from the GUI or the CLI, the GUI always displayed it as "enabled."

37721
The migrate close-files failed with "access not permitted". Now, in a multi-protocol namespace that contains ntfs-qtrees, the ARX will check if the file is open before trying to migrate it.

37245
The SNMP trap, dnsServerOffline, did not include the failed server's IP address in its message text. The CLI show health command, which shows only the name and the message text of each active trap, therefore did not show which DNS server had failed.

37318
Reports from a file-placement rule did not include the rule's namespace or volume names.

337990
When calculating internal mappings for a subshare in a particular CIFS service to back-end shares in a volume, the ARX is no longer confused by like-named subshares that point to other volumes.

37525
An ARX Manager error report option was confusing as it was different between Edit Place Rules and Edit Snapshot. It now reads "Auto delete if no errors" in both places.

37534
The CLI help text for the cifs authentication command neglected to mention NTLM. Now it mentions NTLM.

37544
The reporting of no modify import for directories that are DFS links was incorrect. Now, the report should list an error of 'DF' which indicates that a DFS was found. In addition, the report should lists the directories that failed.

37555
A failed import of a higher priority share in one volume no longer impacts the scheduling of an import of a lower priority share in another volume contained in the same VPU.

37579
The start-time option for collect logs was not adhering to the specified time constraint. Now the CLI help spells out the correct time formats to use for collect logs.

37689
If an import of a share with no-modify enabled resulted in a case-blind directory name collision the process failed with a -70 internal error. A -70 internal error will no longer be returned for import reports or in syslog.

37299
After entering start (without a date/time) for a schedule, the place rule moved the wrong files. This has been fixed by removing the auto-adjust start time.

37253
A core was generated by a race condition and memory leak.

37751
The ARX Manager was not displaying proxy-user in the file history archive. The proxy-user now displays correctly.

37771
The snapshot reconstitution script is not working with reports generated by ARX. The reconstitution script now works correctly.

37819
The kernel.log file contained an excessive number of the following messages:

The ARX kernel now logs an appropriate number of these messages whenever the issue occurs.

38040
The ARX code spuriously declared its Domain Controllers (DCs) to be "slow" if its DNS server required more than 2 seconds to respond. Most of the DNS queries from the ARX were unnecessary, and this caused the ARX-Kerberos processes to repeatedly switch from one redundant DC to another. The ARX Kerberos processes no-longer send out unnecessary DNS queries.

37285
The domain-join operation resulted in an ADJOIN_PWCHANGE error for some network configurations. This occurred when an external routing device allowed traffic from the ARX's proxy-IP addresses to the domain controllers (DCs), but dropped traffic from the ARX's management-IP address. An internal ARX issue caused the ARX to incorrectly send some domain-join packets from the management-IP address instead of a proxy-IP address. As of this release, the ARX sends all of its domain-join packets from its proxy-IP addresses.

37553
Disk drive numbering in the ARX-2000 Installation Guide has been corrected to identify Bay 1 as the top drive and Bay 2 as the bottom drive. This numbering matches the CLI drive designation and the labeling on the switch. The LED documentation has been updated to indicate that flicker indicates drive activity.

37120
There was a problem with the default route in NSM, which caused several NSM cores around pro_arpcache.

37212
Member itemization was not right in an error message. The correct variable now displays in the error message.

28195
If a volume had a connection failure with its CIFS-metadata share, and then someone attempted a metadata migration before any client accessed the volume, the metadata migration failed with a VOL_MDMIGRATE_FILER_PROBE_FAILED error.

37067, 37331
An NSM-core processor, on rare occasions, failed when a CIFS client performed a FIND operation.

37484
The GUI screen for setting a schedule (Policy -> Schedules -> Add...) sometimes created schedules that never fired. The check boxes under Interval -> Weekdays were ineffective.

37511
The GUI field for editing a Place Rule's report prefix had no effect. The specific field was Policy -> Place Rules -> rule-name -> Edit -> Reports -> Prefix.

37517
The GUI did not allow a storage-engineer to delete or verify snapshots. (A "storage-engineer" is an administrator's login account where the assigned admin role is "storage-engineer.")

37518
A drop-down menu was malfunctioning in the GUI. The malfunctioning menu was at the following path: Policy -> Snapshots -> rule-name -> Rule. Whenever you used the drop-down menu, it reverted back to the first snapshot rule in the volume instead of the selected rule. Now it stays set to the selected rule.

37524
When importing a volume in no-modify mode with multiple shares that are expected to merge, and you have "no import sync" and "no import rename-dir," and when the import hits a Case Collision or potentially some other variables, instead of continuing and doing a delayed fail as it should, the import fails immediately. There are two solutions. If you have run an import with "no modify", "no import rename-directory" and "no import sync-attributes", then with an attributes collision during import the report will show the directory which has attribute condition is marked as "skipped." If you do an import with "no modify", "no import rename-directory", with "import sync-attributes", then if you have an attributes collision it will log the inconsistency, stripe the directory, and continue to descend into that directory.

37556
If you ran the show policy details on a volume with a rule that never ran before, the show operation reported an XSL transformation error. This error also appeared for collect diag-info, which invoked the show policy details command.

37823
A file-placement rule failed at volume-scan time whenever a higher-priority rule with no volume-scan matched any the same files or directories. A no volume-scan rule can now co-exist with any other rule, without causing the other rule(s) to fail.

37026
After removing an active-directory alias that was never accepted by any DC, the ARX software did not send an spnAliasUpdateClear trap. This left a persistent alarm condition, spnAliasUpdateRaise, on the ARX.

37031
The no active-directory alias spn CLI command did not remove the SPN from the ARX database until the local DC removed it from the Active Directory DB. Now the ARX DB removes the SPN immediately, and the ARX software continues a background process to delete it from the Active Directory.

37035
When the spnAliasUpdateRaise alarm appeared in the output of the show health CLI command, its Description field started with a "." character.

32434
The following spurious message kept repeating in the error.log file;

35393
The following unclear message appeared in the syslog whenever a volume lost its connection to its metadata share:

bdb_get_metadata_size(): cifs_shim_fstat on fd=134217738 failed [-1].

This message has been suppressed in favor of clearer log messages.

38008
If a client renamed a file to a similar name during a managed-volume import, such as "file.doc" to "FILE.doc," the import could hang indefinitely. This also caused hangs for client operations during the import. Renames no longer cause these import issues.

36608
The show statistics cifs-auth command had incomplete statistics for unsupported protocols. If a client attempted to authenticate with an unsupported CIFS protocol, the resulting failure was not counted in the main output of show statistics cifs-auth. Now it is.

37720
The ARX's Network Services Module (NSM) terminated abruptly if a filer responded with a different SMB command code than the one that the ARX had sent. The ARX now compares the filer reply with the request and drops the reply in the event that they do not match.

38186
On the ARX-500, when an IP address was added to an interface that was on VLAN 1, the IP address could not be removed completely, because it remained in the ARP cache. VLAN 1 was being re-mapped to the primary interface when the IP address was added to the interface. The functionality for removing IP addresses was changed to correct this.

38386
An issue with the ARX's file-tracking functionality that caused failures in some cases has been fixed.

38000
Mac OS X 10.6.3 clients were timing out when copying large directories into direct volumes.

39755
Mac OS X clients were timing out when copying large directories into an ARX managed volume.

38093
Long role names were causing SNMP traps to be sent to an E-mail address after that address had been removed from the trap-recipient list.

Version 5.1.0

Release 5.1.0 included the following fixes and enhancements, also included in this release:

Features

Release 5.1.0 added the following new features to the ARX:

ARX-2000
Release 5.1.0 supports the new ARX-2000 hardware platform, which is a 2U device with 12 1Gbps interfaces.

A Multi-Protocol Volume Supports NFS Symbolic Links (Symlinks) for its CIFS Clients
As of Release 5.1.0, a multi-protocol (NFS and CIFS) volume can display NFS symlinks to its CIFS clients, and allow its CIFS clients to traverse those symlinks. For example, if an NFS client creates a symlink named "pointerDir" that points to "randomDir," any CIFS client can cd to the "pointerDir" symlink to access the "randomDir" directory.

This feature does not support absolute symlinks (such as a link to "/vol/vol2/myDir"). It supports relative symlinks, such as a link to "../myDir" from the current directory.

Limiting CIFS Connections To Tier 2 Filer Servers
Some Tier-2 file servers cannot tolerate a large number of simultaneous CIFS connections. Release 5.1.0 accommodated those file servers with a feature that allows you to set a maximum number of CIFS connections to such a filer. You can use a CLI command, cifs connection-limit, or its GUI equivalent to set this maximum.

Policy Enhancements
The policy engine offers a number of enhancements as of Release 5.1.0, including the following.

Finer Control Over Share Free Space
Release 5.1.0 added per-share controls over free space. For each share, you can establish a volume or percentage of free space to maintain. All policy rules, including share-farm directives, avoid consuming this free space. If a rule attempts to migrate any file to any share, it first verifies that the file will not reduce the share's free space below this level. If the file would violate this free-space limit, the rule pauses and monitors the share's free space. Once the share's free space rises to a higher level (perhaps because of other rules), the rule can resume migrating to the share.
For any given share, you can control the amount of free space to maintain and the amount of free space required for the share to resume accepting file migrations.

Regular Reports on Inline Migrations
A file-placement rule migrates files between volume scans. This occurs inline, whenever a client changes the file so that it no longer belongs on its current back-end share. For example, if a client changes the name of a file so that it fits a new fileset, a placement rule for that fileset migrates the file as needed. As of Release 5.1.0, you can create hourly or daily reports that show the number of migrated files, their combined size, the number of failed migrations, and other useful statistics.

Scheduling Enhancements
One or more file-placement rules, snapshot rules, or other rules can use a schedule to run on a regular basis. Release 5.1.0 added more options to the schedule, such as options to run on the first or last Tuesday of the month, or to run on the 1st and 15th of every month.

Support for NTLMv2
The Release 5.1.0 software supports NTLMv2 authentication for its CIFS clients.

Better Reliability in Lossy Networks
The Kerberos software now uses TCP for its network communication instead of defaulting to UDP first.

Support for Forest-to-Forest Trusts with "Selective Authentication"
In a Windows network, you can design a forest-to-forest trust with "Selective Authentication," where a specific list of Windows users in Forest A are allowed to access any services in Forest B. In previous releases of ARX software, Kerberos clients in Forest A could not use ARX services in Forest B. As of Release 5.1.0, you can configure the ARX software to use a special algorithm, auto-realm traversal, to fully support clients from the other side of a selective-authentication trust. From the CLI, you can use the Kerberos auto-realm-traversal command to use this algorithm.

Share-Import Priority
Release 5.1.0 introduced the import priority command to make a managed volume's file and directory mastership deterministic. A master directory is a directory in a managed volume that has duplicates on multiple back-end shares; one share has the master instance of the directory and the other shares have stripes with the same name, permissions, ACLs, and other attributes. A master file keeps its name, whereas matching files on other shares must change their names. You can use the new import priority command to set some shares to priority 1, so that they win mastership for all of their files and directories. This mastership is deterministic; higher-priority shares win mastership on every import and re-import.

Together with Seamless Import, which imports multiple shares while allowing full client access, this feature is a stepping stone toward a full DR solution. An import at Site A can now yield the same file/directory mastership as an import of the same data at DR Site B.

Fixes

Release 5.1.0 added the following fixes to the ARX:

37899
An anti-virus (AV) scanner on a DC can potentially block the ARX Secure Agent (ASA) installation. Now a pop-up appears during the installation, prompting the installer to re-configure AV scans as needed.

37433
An error in the power-supply numbering has been corrected in the ARX-4000 Hardware Installation Guide.

37865
Previously, there were issues with how objects were handled by Active Directory. An optimization in the code path was made to improve the way internal communication is done between Secure Agent components.

37747
Previously, the ARX Secure Agent, using fgdump, was stopping and restarting the anti-virus software. Now, the SA won't stop and restart anti-virus software during its scan phase.

38108
A customer running ARX Secure Agent saw that temporary services were not removed and that the anti-virus software was not restarting. This was fixed by adding a hot fix to this release.

37121, 37945, 38883
Previously, in the presence of authentication failures (typically due to mis-configuration), the NSM would crash while attempting to properly logoff in-progress CIFS sessions on a file server.

37356
In a redundant pair where one ARX is upgraded to 5.1.0 and its peer is manufactured with 5.1.0, an administrator experienced a delay in logging in after a reboot. A login was not possible until the ARX reached global scope (that is, until it was possible to enter gbl mode in the CLI).

37818
In an ARX with thousands of direct-mapped shares, with at least one CIFS export per share, the GUI operation to show their mappings consumed all system memory.

38279
A problem that caused an outage during the import of shares has been fixed. Now, if a higher priority share fails to import its root directory, any lower priority shares will fail to import as well.

37868
The ARX was mishandling incoming 'Query Path Info' requests that were fragmented over more than one TCP segment.This is a regression that was introduced in 5.1.0 and is now fixed.

39056
The ARX Secure Agent was causing excessive logging. The code has been fixed to squelch excessive health checking.

34772
A particular race condition during a managed-volume import could trigger an unnecessary auto-sync operation. The race condition occurred when one ARX client attempted to remove a file while another attempted to rename it. The auto-sync operation, designed to refresh a volume's metadata after import, had no effect.

27125
The ARX policy engine never recognized that a previously-full target share now had free space. If a placement rule's target share filled to capacity, the rule never resumed after someone added free space.

34523
When the Path and File fields where left blank in the GUI's File History Query page, the query failed without specifying the entry problem. Now the GUI prompts for the missing fields.

34695
In the CLI and in the ARX Manager GUI, the collect operation failed whenever you attempted an NFS-copy to a multi-protocol volume. Now, you can use both NFS and CIFS to send a collect file to one of the ARX's multi-protocol volumes.

34817
The copy nfs|cifs operation, which copies files to an ARX volume, is not supported from the backup ARX. Former releases did not include an explicit error message to explain this; an error message in the current release explains the issue clearly.

35856
If a non-critical process failed to start properly, the ARX rebooted and created a core-memory file. Now a reboot (and failover) only occurs if a critical process fails to start.

36053
The file-tracking daemon sometimes failed to start after an ARX reboot.

26015
GUI did not sort cells correctly when they contained both alpha and numeric characters.

35944
The no shadow operation did not properly remove the shadow-copy database from the volume's file servers.

32521
The policy pause namespace volume operation, followed by a no policy pause, inappropriately caused a volume scan to start.

33470
The output from show load-balancing sometimes displayed the incorrect slot/port number.

34445
The output from show policy sometimes showed a volume as 'offline' when it was not.

34526
The show ip route command on an ARX-4000 did not display "Mgmt" for the out-of-band management routes. It showed a VLAN instead.

35470
The ARX UI allowed a CIFS export with an illegal CIFS character, such as ":". It now blocks a name with any illegal CIFS character.

35542
The ARX did not adequately support the removal of multiple shares from a single volume. Now it allows you to remove multiple shares from the same volume without any errors.

35614
The CLI failed and created a core-memory file if an administrator entered the critical route command with an invalid subnet mask (such as "1.1.1.1").

35876
An internal metadata inconsistency caused a share removal to fail. (From the CLI, you can use remove-share migrate and similar commands to remove a share from a managed volume.) Managed-volume software can now successfully remove a share with these inconsistencies.

35925
The online help was inaccurate for the windows-mgmt-auth CLI command, and it appeared next to the incorrect option.

35426
If an administrator used an incorrect syntax for the copy command, the administrator's SSH connection hung.

36368
The no wins command did not allow optional arguments for ease of use. Now it does.

36545
When a managed-volume import failed due to a slow metadata share, there were no syslog messages indicating the cause of the failure. Now, syslog messages appear to describe the problem with the metadata share, and to associate the metadata-share issue with the failing import.

36186
When a CIFS namespace had an NFS export and someone invoked the GUI's Virtual Services page, the GUI failed. The current release does not allow a CIFS-only namespace to offer any NFS exports.

32574
The virtual server arx-name ? command should list the single valid VIP for the server, but it listed all the VIPs on the ARX. Now it only lists the correct VIP.

35502
The show snmp-server command displayed no output unless there was at least one host to receive SNMP traps. (The snmp-server host command adds a host to receive traps.) Now the command displays the current SNMP configuration under any circumstances.

36581
NFS write throughput to Data Domain dropped to zero.

37455
Neither the ARX-4000 or the ARX-2000 were fully supported for SNMP walks.

35282
The ARX was in a "too many open files" condition.

35704
The ARX was persistently stuck due to metadata inconsistencies.

30999
Reboot required after running config applied in order to get NTP to work. This issue has been fixed by by moving ntp server config to the end in running-config, so that ntpd starts polling the ntp server after running-config is done, without additional reboot or reset ntp server.

31365
A CIFS client could not traverse an NFS symlink to a directory. Release 5.1.0 introduced CIFS-Symlink Support to address this issue.

35738
The serial number was truncated in the GUI. This issue has been solved by adding the 2-digit manufacturer code before the serial number.

35541
Adding SNMP server information with a port number created two entries. Now it does not create two entries.

35596
Managed Volume went offline after an upgrade. This no longer happens.

36609
A Data Domain filer behind a managed volume caused the volume to advertise "FAT32" as its file system. Now there is a CLI command that you can use to set the advertised file-system name.

36841
The ARX boot-config file was lost after a software upgrade. This problem has been fixed.

34454
Asymmetric network reboots, even when not joined back in the pair. This issue is now fixed.

36566
A VIP Created in the GUI was offline, but was online when created in the CLI. Netbiosd has been fixed.

36421
A shadow copy from a pre-5.0.0 site to a post-5.0.0 site caused a failover at the source site. The current release allows a shadow copy to cross between these releases without causing a reboot.

35006
The GUI's Status page reported an incorrect value for available Files Allocated. This issue was fixed in the GUI by calculating the remaining files based on hardware type not configured VPUs.

36568
The GUI displayed a working CIFS service as disabled. This issue has now been fixed.

35025
The GUI and CLI warning When disabling a share, have GUI and CLI warning messages match. The GUI warning has been updated to reflect the warning.

35040
MPNS namespaces had poor CIFS performance, due to using UDP. The default now is for Kerberos to request TCP.

36110
Asymmetric read-only enabled by default on new share config. As of 5.0.1, we support NetApp environments where the cifs.ntfs_ignore_unix_security_ops option is set to "on."

35185
Forest to Forest Trust did not work with selective authentication. Now there is a CLI command, kerberos auto-realm-traversal, that can configure the ARX to function with selective authentication.

36499
Accessing GUI through IE took a very long time.This issue is fixed in this release and the pages no longer take a long time to load.

36656
NTLM authentication server incorrectly shows offline if the IP address cannot be resolved by the ARX. This was fixed by adding 60 seconds before starting NTLM Secure-Agent monitoring during system startup.

35757
Kerberos clients were unable to connect after an update 4.0.1. This issue is fixed and the ARX no longer advertises NTLMSSP in Kerberos namespaces unless they also have NTLM[v2] or else have anon-access enabled

35151
A customer experienced a failure to replicate a subshare. This issue is fixed and now the ARX deletes all subshare mapping records instead of generated only records.

34871
Full tree walks were happening after database rebuild, which was caused by the lack of synchronization in the shadow receiver. This issue was fixed by enabling the path lock at the right time and on right paths.

37047
An internal error caused the show chassis command to hang, and it caused the ARX to send fanFail traps.

35278
Watchdog reboots of slot 3 on both ARXes after upgrade. The fix prevents a possible reset of an ARX due to watchdog timeout for ARX-6000s that are not directly connected on the redundancy link.

32631
The ARX-1000 failed to send a Linkup trap after channel configuration. Linkup traps for each physical interface and the channel now work.

34961
LIP_LIB & L2SW_LVL7 messages kept appearing every 5 minutes. The problem is cause because the ARX asks for Slot 2 processor 2 on an ARX-500, which does not exist this problem has been fixed.

35737
On an ARX-1000, the OOB mgmt no shutdown command did not work until reload. This problem has been fixed and it now works without a reload.

35872
Smtp server names did not allow digits as their first characters. The ARX now complies with RFC1123 section 2.1, which allow smtp servers to have a hostname that starts with a digit.

36868
The managed-volume software failed and generated a core-memory file during import. This problem has been fixed.

35527
The ARX MIB was not compliant with RFC 2578. Now, the ARX MIB is compliant.

25983
The Remove Share report did not indicate shares that had an "access denied" problem. The software now indicates in the remove report whether the error came from the share being removed or he relocate-dirs share.

36587
The ARX would sometimes experience an NSM crash when processing CIFS traffic from previously disconnected trees. The ARX now properly drops this traffic.

25054
GUI: Added new status icons to the Exports page. These now include all of the following: Offline (red star), Degraded (yellow triangle), Online (green circle),Read Only (yellow triangle), Not Found (red star), Unavailable (red Star), and Snapshot (green circle).

34913
If power is lost to the ARX during the firmware upgrade process, the ACM processor gets stuck in downloading while booting up. This was due to a software change and the software has been fixed.

37195
A Windows 7 client could not see any ARX snapshots in the "Previous Versions" tab. This tab now displays snapshots for Windows 7 clients.

Version 5.0.7

This was a Maintenance Release for the 5.00.nnn series of software releases. It did not include any new features or enhancements beyond those of Release 5.0.5. It contained the following fixes:

344440
The ARX now reports correctly when a directory imported for multiple protocols uses the same name with different case characters.

346648, 346301
A bug in the NFSv3 TCP proxy code caused a buffer overflow, which resulted in memory corruption and crashes when a 64K WRITE was forwarded to the control plane by the NSM. This forwarding happens only when a client sends a WRITE request with a stale file handle as all other WRITEs are handled completely in the NSM. This has been fixed.

Version 5.0.6

This was a Maintenance Release for the 5.00.nnn series of software releases. It did not include any new features or enhancements beyond those of Release 5.0.5. It contained the following fixes:

337569
An NFS service occasionally created a very large database file, and that file caused reboots to take a very long time. The file grew at a fast rate for NFS clients that mounted, unmounted, and remounted the NFS service at a high frequency. Now, the database file grows at a slower rate for constant NFS mount and unmount operations.

36812
Policy rules were stuck in a "Migrating" state after all selected files moved.

337998
A customer noted six cores. This was fixed by adjusting the loop count to 10000.

37222
The CLI daemon now correctly reports that no transactions are left after completing CLI commands.

38433
The file tracking archive behavior was holding database transactions open for too long. We now we use a separate transaction for each rule. This limits the time a transaction is open to one set of archive operations.

38544, 38346, 38587, 38588
An NSM crash could happen in cases where there are connectivity/networking issues with a domain controller. While waiting for an authorization response from the control plane, the back-end file server could tear down the TCP connection, causing memory corruption when the domain controller finally responds. The NSM now detects and corrects this situation to properly return an error to the client.

38493, 38615
A problem in which the deletion of a snapshot rule for which there were snapshots present prevented the browsing of other snapshots has been fixed.

39300
The clock on an ARX-6000 ASM could drift in time if the SCM did not respond to a request to provide the correct time. ASM clock synchronization function now times out if the response is not received in timely manner.

339444
An NFS volume sometimes encountered an error, NSM_PRESTO_PKT_MUTEX_ERROR, when a file-history-archive rule took snapshots on back-end filers. This stopped all NFS access to the volume, and required a restart of its front-end NFS service(s).

339663
The snapshot-create reports from a file-history-archive rule contained incorrect file-server information for the metadata share. The incorrect information was the filer name and NFS-export name.

339676
When shares in a presentation volume have multiple attach points to managed volumes, the 'show host... path' used to display wrong path information. The fix was to use additional qualifier for the attach name when querying the OMDB for path information.

37892
A customer with an unusual VLAN configuration experienced asymmetric routing issues. This was fixed with a patch.

38232
The ARX didn't do symmetric routing w.r.t. VIP when NFS clients were on locally attached VLANs. The code change was to give precedence to the per-vlan default route if available.

38041, 37765, 38209, 38864
Using the CLI to copy files within a CIFS namespace sometimes caused an internal database failure.

38739
The ARX now has increased capacity for NFS ACLs from 512 to 1024.

38144
If the Active-Directory (AD) forests were configured manually on the ARX, it was possible to create a CIFS-access problem. The problem was that CIFS clients from trusted domains could not connect to front-end CIFS shares on the ARX.

37350
There was inconsistent output between the global-config and namespace.

37229
A Linux client with cifsvfs could not copy one file over another. The error was "Permission denied."

38442
If a CIFS-client application sends a packet with a pass-through Information Level, the ARX (which does not support pass-through levels) should reject it with a STATUS_INVALID_PARAMETER response. Before this fix, it was incorrectly responding with STATUS_SUCCESS. This created unpredictable results for the client application.

37955
When DCs in the local Active Directory gave repetitively slow responses to Kerberos/UDP queries, the ARX's network processors sometimes ran out of UDP ports.

39076
When changes are made in a directory, the wrong number of files is returned when doing a directory listing.

38891
System wouldn't boot with long host name. Host names now limited to 32 characters.

38066
The capture session operation unnecessarily duplicates internal TCP-ACK packets, and continues to duplicate them after you stop the capture session. (This duplication does not occur for an ARX-500 chassis, or for any capture session that captures packets to/from all proxy-IP addresses.) Now the no capture session operation stops the internal packet duplication.

38131
Large numbers of TCP duplicate packets were being generated and were visible in network traces. This has been corrected.

39599, 338787, 339803
Watchdog timeouts caused two NSM cores. The code was fixed by changing the timer from 32bit to 64bits.

37382
A snapshot remove operation for a particular back-end share would always time out after 50 seconds. This was insufficient for some back-end servers. After your ARX gets the fix for this issue, F5 Support can set a higher timeout for snapshot-related commands if required for your site.

37387, 38238
When a shadow-copy operation copied a file over 4 Gigabytes, it occasionally failed and produced a large core-memory file. This issue was related to issue 35679.

37482
Users were unable to view the contents of the snapshots from the previous version tab. When they clicked on the snapshot, it produced an error.

Version 5.0.5

Features

ARX Release 5.0.5 is a maintenance update that provides support for new ARX-4000 hardware; specifically a new control plane with new power supplies.

You can identify whether or not you have the new hardware by a physical examination. The original version of the ARX-4000 used a control plane containing six 3 1/2 inch disk drives. (The serial numbers of these commodity servers start with BZDS.) The new ARX-4000 uses a control plane that contains two 2 1/2 inch disk drives. (The serial numbers of the new chassis start with 0700.)

If your installation has upgraded existing ARX-4000 systems instead of upgrading to the new platform, the ARX-4000 documentation for 5.0.5 contains some information that does not apply to your model. For former versions of the ARX-4000 chassis, consult:

Rev E of the ARX-4000 Hardware Installation Guide

Rev C of the ARX-4000 Installation Card

These are included in your 5.0.5 release; you can retrieve these earlier versions from the GUI or download them from the CLI.

Fixes

Release 5.0.5 added the following fixes to the ARX:

36233
There was a DNAS core and continuous reboots of cluster.

36573
Snapshots fail with a managed volume with a share farm with two shares. Timeouts for the snapshots have been increased and this fixes the problem.

34347
If you issue a Snapshot Remove command, then all of the contents of the virtual snapshot you are removing will be removed regardless of the current snapshot contents settings.

35115
Spurious battery temperature values were being reported.

35243
There was an error in CPU speed calculation logic. Now the CPU speed is correctly reported.

35245
Previously, deleting a report would only unlink the report name from the file system. The disk space for the report file would only be freed when all references to that report were removed (unlinked). Other references to a report could include being opened for copying or collection, and so on.

Now, when a report is deleted, it is first truncated meaning that the report is terminated. There can be no remaining references to the report. After that, when the report file is removed, not only will its name be removed from the file system but its disk space will be freed immediately. Therefore, there can now be no discrepancy between the amount of disk space that is reported for /acopia/reports before and after the switch is reloaded.

35266
The ARX Manager can take a null pointer exception while editing an Export due to Back button use. Do not use the Back button in releases prior to 5.0.5. You can use the back button in 5.0.5 and higher.

35313
The no ip address command for the NTLM authentication server was not fully implemented. This operation is now allowed as long as the NTLM authentication server is not in use by a namespace.

35314
Previously, the maximum snmp-server entry limit was being checked prior to adding and deleting an entry. If the maximum snmp-server entry limit had already been reached, the operation failed. The fix was to only check the limit when adding a new entry.

35493
ARX-4000+ Control plane power supply LEDs do not change to amber (or otherwise indicate failure).

It is difficult to detect a power supply fan failure on the new ARX-4000 control plane. The control plane power supply LEDs do not change color or indicate failure in any way that you can detect visually. However, if you think a fan failure has occurred, you can inspect each power supply fan to determine if the fan is dead and to detect air movement (or the lack of air movement).

If you have access to the CLI, enter the show chassis chassinfo command which shows the status of all 4 power supplies. It is best not to rely on the LEDs because the LED states are different for each power supply manufacturer.

35505
Prior to release 5.0.5 the ARX-4000 power supply numbering was inconsistent between the data plane and control plane.

Prior to 5.0.5, when facing the back of the ARX-4000, the control plane power supplies were designated 1/1 (top) and 1/2 (bottom). The data plane power supplies were designated left-to-right as 2/2 and 2/1, respectively.

Starting with 5.0.5, the ARX-4000 includes a new control plane (with new power supplies) and a re-numbering of the data plane power supplies. When facing the back of the box, the control plane power supplies are designated left-to-right as 1/1 and 1/2, respectively. The data plane power supplies are designated left-to-right as 2/1 and 2/2, respectively.

When upgrading an existing ARX-4000 to 5.0.5, take note of these changes. If you experience a data plane power supply failure and consult the output of the show chassis chassinfo, it reflects the new designations. For example, the following output indicates a failure of the left-hand data plane power supply.

36116
After an upgrade from 3.2.2 to 5.0.1 some MAC OSX users were not being able to login or they experienced degradation in network response.

36122
Older snapshots were not being deleted by an ARX volume. Now older snapshots are being deleted correctly.

36158
Mac users were getting significant performance hits through the ARX. This issue has now been fixed.

36965
If a managed volume already imported a share from an NTFS qtree, it was unable to import another share from an NTFS qtree with the "ntfs_ignore_unix_security_ops" option. The new share stayed indefinitely in the "Pending Import" state. This only occurred if the first share was imported before an upgrade and the remaining shares were imported after an upgrade.

36943
When CIFS clients unexpectedly cancelled their connections in the middle of a "find" operation (such as Transaction2FindFirst), NSM software allocated memory without freeing it. If this happened often enough, the ARX sent nsmResourceThreshold traps for the "cifsSidBitmap" resource. Eventually, some CIFS clients were unable to connect. The problem is resolved in this Release.

35721
A client could send a non-Latin 1 character sequence file name to a Latin 1 namespace during an import. We now restrict and deny non-Latin 1 sequence files during an import to a Latin 1 namespace.

34771
A direct (or presentation) volume could not attach to an NFSv3/UDP export unless the export also supported NFSv2. Direct volumes can now attach to NFSv3/UDP exports whether or not the exports also support NFSv2.

35679
An integer overflow prevented the shadow volume copy from copying files over 4G. In addition, there was the large memory consumption by shadow receiver. A fix was put in place to prevent integer overflow when the file size is over 4G. A throttle was implemented to prevent the potential large memory consumption by the shadow receiver.

36003
The NSM was generating a core when the NSM failed to handle an error reply from a file server for a transaction of snapshot. The issue occurred when multiple transactions were done at the same time while the ARX was waiting for response from the file server, the ARX deleted the cache information incorrectly, then caused an NSM core.

35128
Mac OS X clients using SMB file sharing components that are part of the OS were unable to mount shares hosted on the ARX. This was caused by a crash of the NetAuthAgent component on Mac OS X. ARX software in this release works around this problem.

35210
Administrators were unable to change the quorum disk location when the quorum disk was offline. Administrators now can change the location of the quorum disk when it is offline.

35969
Previously, shadow volumes encountered sharing violations in .acopia_shadow and then cored. This has been fixed.

33211
The ARX erroneously allowed you to assign the same secondary-IP address to multiple external-filer configurations. Now the CLI and GUI prevent this mis-configuration.

Version 5.0.0

Release 5.0.0 included the following fixes and enhancements, also included in this release.

Features

Release 5.0.0 adds the following features to the ARX:

File Tracking
An ARX managed volume moves files through tiers of back-end storage as time passes. Some installations use data-protection systems that perform backups and restores directly on their back-end filers. If a backup occurs on Filer A before an ARX volume migrates some files to Filer B, it is unclear which files should be restored to which filer. The new file tracking application resolves this issue.

You can configure an external file server as a file-history archive and configure a volume's snapshot rules so that they regularly store their file locations in that archive. Later, you can make queries about current file locations as well as their locations as they moved from tier to tier in the past. From the GUI, access the File History Query option from the navigation pane. From the CLI, use the commands described in the chapter, Tracking Files on your Back-End Storage in the CLI Maintenance Guide.

Seamless Managed-Volume Import
Previous ARX-software Releases blocked certain client operations, such as renaming directories, while a managed volume imported storage from its file servers. Release 5.000.000 lifts all client restrictions during a managed-volume import, so that clients can access the managed volume's storage as soon as it is enabled.

Kerberos Authentication for the ARX Proxy User
An ARX proxy user is a set of Windows credentials (a username, Windows domain, and password) that a managed volume can use as its identity for autonomous operations. A proxy user in previous releases always authenticated with back-end file servers using NTLM; as of Release 5.0.0, it can use Kerberos as well.

Copying Files Between ARX Maintenance Directories and ARX Volumes
Release 5.0.0 offers a new option for transporting maintenance files: you can transfer them to and from ARX volumes. This is designed for sites that do not permit FTP access (or other Internet access) to their data centers. You can use the copy {nfs | cifs} CLI command, or its GUI equivalent, to copy software-release files, diagnostic files, logs, or other maintenance-related files. Refer to the CLI Reference for detailed instructions on using the CLI command.

New Online Help in the GUI
The 5.0.0 GUI now offers extensive online help, with indexing, book marking, and a search interface. These new navigation tools give administrators the opportunity to pursue any given topic and learn more as needed.

Minor CLI Change for Shadow-Copy Rules
The allow-shared-access CLI command (and its GUI equivalent) is now hard-coded for all shadow-copy rules. The command no longer appears in the CLI, and the equivalent option no longer appears on the GUI. Contact Customer Support if you wish to disable this feature.

Fixes

Release 5.0.0 fixes the following software issues:

35114
When clients repeatedly performed a metadata modifying operation (create, delete, or rename) on the same file or a permission/attribute modification on the same directory during import, the import software unnecessarily rescanned the modified object's directory. The import software no longer performs these redundant scans.

32814
Snapshot rule spuriously reported that it failed when it experienced a minor communication error. The failure appeared in the snapshot report, along with the following message at the bottom of the report:

Unable to notify policy engine to resume any active migrations.

31073
The ARX CLI failed if you entered multi-byte characters (such as Japanese characters) through a terminal emulator that did not support UTF-8.

32636
The output from collect was inaccessible unless you explicitly specified a .tgz extension. The CLI and GUI formerly accepted this directive without the proper extension; the current release prompts for the .tgz extension if it is missing.

25487
The management address for an external filer, set with the ip address a.b.c.d management CLI command, could not be on the out-of-band (OOB) management subnet for the ARX. That restriction is now lifted.

31029
The show ntlm-auth-server status CLI command got an OPEN_SSL_ERROR string if the NTLM-server password was longer than 22 characters. It now allows up to 64 characters, as indicated by the documentation and online help.

32728
If you incorporated a non-existent filer snapshot into an ARX-snapshot rule (with the snapshot manage CLI command), the ARX erroneously created an empty ARX snapshot.

18135
Under rare circumstances, an nsck ... rebuild on a shadow volume made the volume stall in "importing" state.

30634
The ntp server command allowed v1 and v2 of the NTP protocol, two versions that were not supported. The command no longer offers those options.

32570
An ill-timed filer error sometimes resulted in a spurious "Completed" state for a file-placement rule. In the current release, all reports correctly show a failed migration whenever a filer issue causes a failure.

32609
The report for a failed file-placement rule may terminate with the RULE_INTERRUPTED error. This error is designed for rules that were interrupted by configuration changes and reboots. In former releases, it was also inappropriately used for filer errors and connection issues.

32468
The 'Files in Fileset' counter was incorrect in a File-Placement report and the 'show policy' (detailed) output. The counter for 'Files in Fileset' was higher than the actual number of files when it was incorrect. The counter is accurate in the current release.

32473
Incorrect "Snapshot State" appeared in snapshot reports and the output of the "show snapshot" CLI command. The "Snapshot State" of a sparse snapshot should appear as "Sparse" if any of the volume's shares are excluded for any reason. The snapshot state appeared as "Complete" when shares are excluded because of filer configuration. In this release, the snapshot state correctly appears as "Sparse."

30406
Shadow Volume sync performance for ARX-4000 was poor compared to that of the ARX-6000. Sync performance in the current Release is equivalent between the two hardware platforms.

34528
The output of the show global-config command displayed reserve file settings for direct volumes.

30414
Could not attach directory to . for a Windows file server.

28709
Conflicting place rules caused a deadlock when simultaneously migrating files between two separate share-farms. Each rule was asking the other rule for a particular share's index while holding a lock preventing simultaneous access.

27986
Users could not log on due to authentication errors which were fixed with health check and load balancing improvements.

31083
A standard NFS error resulted in extra "DFM_FILE_ASSERT" messages in the syslog. The ARX no longer logs these unnecessary messages.

30753
When the dncd tried to send message with too many entries it cored. The NSM can only support up to 64K attach points. When processing a directory with a large number of sub directories, break up the request into multiple messages, which will keep dncd from coring.

33403
Previously, there was a problem display the Japanese character set in a share using a MAC 10.4 GUI on an ARX. This issues is resolved now in the handling of the RPC.

31513
Removing an empty direct/presentation volume will cause disruption to all clients that are attached to that volume. A message now warns the user when the volume is still in use by an active global service (Virtual Service in ARX Manager) and asks if they want to destage anyway.

29292
Previously, log messages contained the use of forward and back slashes for path names. They used to use forward slashes in some cases and now they are consistent.

33057
Previously, If a file server was very busy, it was slow to respond to CIFS file close messages. Some clients would resend the close if they don't receive a response after some period of time. Multiple closes on the same file identifier would cause the internal state in the ARX to become corrupted resulting in a failure in an NSM processor. This is now resolved.

31779
A shadow-copy rule produced ambiguous errors when its target volume had no more file credits. The errors appeared in the shadow-copy report in the Target Information section, similar to this error:

FTP Put error: 'remote file appears to be the same as the local file, upload is not necessary'.

This rare failure no longer occurs.

30970
The redundancy software did not send an SNMP trap when the heartbeat directory was restricted to read-only access. The heartbeat directory is on the external filer used as a quorum-disk. Now the redundancy software raises the haPairQDiskOffline trap whenever this write failure occurs.

31854
The ARX had insufficient algorithms for checking the health of its remote Domain Controllers (DCs) and for quickly switching to a healthy redundant DC. As of Release 5.0.0, the ARX began using an LDAP query for its health checks, and offers an option to declare a set of "preferred" DCs in a given Windows Domain. The CLI Storage Guide contains instructions for setting DC preferences and changing the timeout for DC health-check queries.

32565
The ARX kept two copies of each core-memory file. Core files contain important diagnostic information for processes that failed; they typically consume large amounts of space on the internal disks. The ARX now keeps only a single copy of each core file.

30293
User access issues resolved by adding a separate auth queue to vcifs. This is used for incoming NEGOTIATE and SESSION SETUP requests.

32534
The Mibs.tgz file, available in the "software" directory, contained the Secure Agent code as well as the MIBs. The Secure Agent packages have been removed from the Mibs.tgz file. They are still available on the ARX, in the "software" directory alongside the Mibs.tgz file.

32080
A file-placement rule kept trying and failing to migrate files after its target share ran out of space.

30303
If a file server behind an ARX volume ran out of space, directory renames locked out all other client access for 10 to 15 seconds. The directory renames now fail immediately, without locking out clients.

Workaround: Disable the rule that is scanning.

31258
The clear statistics cifs-auth CLI command did not clear all of the CIFS-authentication statistics. The Failure Reason Table at the end of the show statistics cifs-auth output retained its error strings. Now the clear command clears the full contents of the corresponding show command.

29951
The cancel import CLI command (or its GUI equivalent) failed for a share that had not yet started its import scan. This failure made it impossible to cancel the share import. It also prevented future import cancellations and volume controls in the share's volume.

31227
The POLICY_PEP logging component wrote misleading messages to the syslog during normal tiering operation:

These messages appeared when the POLICY_PEP component was at a logging level of "debug." They were not errors. We have rewritten these log messages to be less confusing in the current release.

30841
This redundancy configuration caused a dual reboot:

The quorum disk and a managed volume's metadata share are on the same back-end file server,

the metadata share is configured as a "critical resource" on the ARX, and

file server goes offline.

In the current release, no reboot or failover occurs.

30784
Share discovery used to not preserve back-end share descriptions. When creating ARX exports by scanning back-end storage, the ARX now initializes the ARX export description from the back end. ** Subsequent changes to the ARX export description will NOT be propagated to existing back-end shares or subshares.** .

34180
If a multi-protocol volume had a non-latin1 character (such as a Japanese character) in its name, the volume software sometimes failed and produced a core file. The failure only occurred if the namespace's NFS-side character encoding was set to "iso-8859-1;" from the CLI, you can set this with the character-encoding command.

31292
A reboot issue had no immediately client-visible effects, but had the potential to take services offline at a later time. An NSCK destage of one of the affected volumes could trigger the service loss. (From the CLI, you use the nsck ... destage command to destage a volume.) At the time of the destage, all of the volume's front-end services went offline. The root cause of this outage has been corrected.

27621
The show namespace CLI command and the GUI's Managed Volume Details screen both display the number of files used and files available on a volume's shares. The number in the CLI output was different from that of the GUI; one was rounded and the other was exact. In the current release, the numbers match in both interfaces.

31528
The option to ignore a back-end file/directory name was applied to directories during import, and it was applied to both files and directories after import. The CLI command was named ignore-directory, and its GUI equivalent had a similar name. As a result of this inconsistent treatment of ignored names, a file could successfully import into a managed volume and then be ignored by volume software, making it inaccessible to clients. The CLI command (and function) has been renamed to ignore-name: this command and its GUI equivalent now ignores all directory and file names that it matches.

Version 4.1.3

Release 4.1.3 was a maintenance release that fixed the following software issues:

37329, 37333, 39011, 37521
A file-placement rule sometimes stopped migrating with 199 files in a "pending migration" state. This was due to an internal resource-contention issue that is resolved in this release.

37890
The ARX's NFS proxy was not sending keepalives on all connections to the filers. This was addressed by forcing the transmit thread to use the connection from the keepalive process.

37512, 34517, 37464, 37472
Some customers experienced that NFS volumes were inaccessible until failover. Several changes have been made to the NFS proxy server and support software to correct the issue.

37165
Email home did not check slot temperature. Now it does check slot temperature.

37815, 37939
A shadow-copy rule frequently stopped without finishing. This issue occurred when a client renamed a directory in the source volume. This was due to an internal issue that is now resolved.

Version 4.1.1

Release 4.1.1 was a maintenance release that fixed the following software issues:

35416, 35648
A failed CIFS directory rename to the volume root of a multi-protocol namespace used to result in the retry operation failing. The solution was to specify a NFS protocol when updating the parents filehandles.

35786
Policy migrations were failing due to a rare internal failure. The internal failure has been corrected.

36187
If a back-end server stopped responding to an open CIFS session, and the NSM processor with the CIFS session had an increasing number of client queries for the server, the NSM processor sometimes failed.

36818
If you enabled a managed volume on an ARX-500, failed over to its redundant peer, and then enabled the volume's CIFS service on the peer, the CIFS service sometimes got stuck in the 'starting' state.

35521
The internal hard drives supplied to F5 Networks, Inc. for some ARX-500s and ARX-1000s had a firmware issue. The issue sometimes caused the drives to be remounted as read-only, thereby taking the chassis offline. F5 issued letters to all customers known to have this issue, and replaced the faulty drives.

35947
Previously, when a user is tried to find a previous version of a file or directory using the Previous Versions tab in the Properties dialog box from Windows Explorer, previous versions of the file or directory that were part of at least one snapshot of the managed volume did not appear in the list of previous versions. In this case, the snapshots were available by browsing the available snapshots in the snapshot directory (whose name is configurable, but is "~snapshot" by default) on the managed volume. This has been fixed.

35140
After the maximum amount of NTP servers were configured, someone attempted to move one and it failed. This command now works as expected, and moving an NTP server is successful.

35486
Previously, a forced storage remove left old replica filehandles around with storage IDs that no longer existed in the volume. This problem has been fixed and old replica filehandles are no longer left behind.

45140
After the maximum amount of NTP servers were configured, someone attempted to move one and it failed. The command now works as expected.

33694
Two administrative operations often resulted in omTransactionsRaise traps from the ARX: those invoked by the collect and remove-share ... migrate CLI commands, or their GUI equivalents.

34855
If a managed volume with browsing enabled was importing when a process requested the volume's free space, the import slowed noticeably.

31748
UPN support. Added UPN support for NTLM.

29219
The cancel sync files CLI command had an issue with command completion. The syntax below showed all volumes on the ARX instead of the set of volumes in namespace:

cancel sync files namespace volume ?

Now the command shows only the list of volumes from the specified namespace.

32965
An ARX-snapshot removal is designed to remove each component snapshot from the ARX volume's file servers. If any file server failed to delete its snapshot, the ARX noted the failure and then removed all records of the ARX snapshot from its database. This made it impossible to delete the file-server snapshot from the ARX. Now the delete-snapshot operation keeps the ARX snapshot as a "sparse" snapshot; the sparse snapshot only includes the file-server snapshot(s) where the delete failed.

30951
EMC Checkpoints fail with error "Unable to find file system ID <FSID #>." It is possible that the query can fail to find the file system ID. The usual cause of this problem is that the management IP address set for the external-filer object does not identify the correct EMC Control Station for the file system. To view a list of file system IDs and names, run the command 'nas_fs -list' on the EMC Control Station's management console. If the file system ID reported in the error message is not in the list, then it is likely that the wrong Control Station IP address is configured for the external-filer.

33126, 33676
Previously, the LED link light did not come on for 100Mbps setting. This issue has been resolved.

33024
In a particular VPU configuration, a share-removal operation could cause volume software to restart and produce a core file. The restart occurred for a volume that shared its VPU domain with 63 other volumes. (You can remove a share with the remove-share CLI command or its GUI equivalent.)

32595
A shadow volume sometimes failed if it was backed by an NTFS qtree. The problem was that the shadow-copy rule was using NFS to write its database to the qtree. This release uses CIFS to write the shadow-copy database to an NTFS qtree.

33023
The policy engine failed to detect a rare metadata failure that made it impossible to operate successfully. File-placement rules continued to take CPU cycles without successfully migrating any files. The place rules added many messages to the syslog with this statement: "(No policy queue exists for this volume.)." In the current release, all rule processing stops for a managed volume with this failure.

33706
The snapshot manage CLI command had an unclear error message. The error message is clearer in this release.

33194
An NSM-core processor could fail with a rare combination of NLM transactions (from NFS clients) and file-server outages. These combinations no longer cause an NSM failure.

33312
The snapshot manage CLI command (or its GUI equivalent) failed unless it was preceded by a snapshot create operation in the same managed volume.

33217
When a CIFS-only volume on the ARX attempted to import a CIFS share from a NetApp filer, the import could fail due to an NFS security setting on the filer. The failure occurred only for an ARX volume configured for CIFS subshares, and for a NetApp share backed by a Unix qtree. The NetApp's Unix-security setting is now properly ignored by the CIFS-import process.

34834
In previous releases, no output appeared for the show statistics namespace fastpath CLI command.

Version 4.1.0

Release 4.1.0 included the following fixes and enhancements, also included in this release.

Features

Release 4.1.0 added the following features to the ARX:

CIFS Access-Based Enumeration (ABE) Support
Release 4.1.0 adds CIFS support for Access-Based Enumeration (ABE). If an ARX volume has ABE enabled, its CIFS clients can only see the files that they have permission to read. That is, inaccessible files and directories do not appear in directory listings. This feature is designed to eliminate client curiosity about files and directories that they do not have permission to view.

The following ABE-supporting filers have been qualified for use behind ABE-supporting volumes:

EMC Celerra, software version 5.5.

NetApp, software versions 7.2.3 and 7.2.5.

Windows 2003 R2 SP2.

Windows 2003 SP1.

NOTE: For any ABE-supporting volume backed with NetApp filers, the volume's namespace requires a proxy-user with new access privileges. The proxy-user account must belong to the "Administrators" group on each ABE-supporting NetApp share. This is a higher level of access than the "Backup Operator" privileges required for file migrations.

Support for Maximum Age for Kerberos-Machine-Account Passwords
Some Domain Controllers (DCs) support a "Maximum Age" option that you can set for Machine-Account passwords. This is a secret password exchanged between a machine account (such as an ARX-CIFS service) and the DC when the machine/service first joins the Active-Directory domain. By default, the password lasts indefinitely. Administrators have an option on some DCs to set an expiration period, called a "maximum age." If the machine-account password expires for an ARX-CIFS service, the service can no longer use Kerberos to authenticate its CIFS clients.

Release 4.1.0 adds an operation to resolve this issue. For a site where the maximum age is set and about to expire, you can use the cifs rekey CLI command (or its GUI equivalent) to regenerate the key(s) for your ARX-CIFS service(s).

Fixes

Release 4.1.0 fixed the following software issues, also fixed in this release:

35421
On an ARX-6000 system, certain types of network control packets could exhaust all internal memory associated with the networking hardware in the system. No further network communication can occur on this port until an ARX failover is performed. This problem is fixed with this release.

30623
A reboot failed to recover an ARX-4000 in SSB-degraded mode. SSB-degraded mode means that the PCI connection has failed between the DP and the CP. In this release, the connection recovers after a CLI reload or its GUI equivalent.

32330
The snapshot timeout client-tolerance command is unsupportable in some file-server topologies. The solution to this issue is to automatically generate a suitable timeout value for ARX snapshots, and to remove the command.

32086
When an NSM fails in an ARX-6000, certain CLI commands and GUI operations hang without ever completing.

31713
When removing a back-end share from a managed volume, a transient connectivity problem with the share's filer can stop the share-removal operation. The share-removal operation now retries for a longer period of time before canceling. (You can invoke a share-removal operation with the no share, no filer, or remove-share CLI commands, or their GUI equivalents.)

The solution to this problem is to issue a new CLI command, expect change-mfg-date.scr serial-number, where the serial-number is the one on the chassis label. This changes the output of show chassis chassinfo.

32323
Some processes on the SCM or ACM use progressively-more memory, causing the ARX to eventually refuse administrative logins and offer progressively-slower service to its clients.

31240
The ARX supports a single default route; this may be a problem in a multi-VLAN network with a certain firewall configuration.
The new ip route ... per-vlan CLI command allows an administrator to work around this issue. Refer to the CLI Reference for details on this command.

31674
An alarming syslog message, "xsdd_aipc_task: IPC service error 3...," may appear repeatedly on an ARX, often when the ARX is processing a large number of SID translations. This message does not typically indicate a service-affecting problem, so its severity has been downgraded.

31549
The CLI online help does not line up its options with the correct descriptions. For example, the description below should line up with the generic "Text" option instead of the specific "arx.testlab.sg" choice:

30912
If an ARX with two internal disks (an ARX-1000, ARX-2000, ARX-4000, or ARX-6000) loses both of them, it fails to reboot so that its redundant peer can take over its storage services. The resolution to this issue is a proper reboot and a faster failover.

31805
An NSM processor fails and produces a core-memory file if it receives a particular error from a back-end-CIFS filer. This only occurs in a presentation (or "direct") volume.

32224
The following circumstances lead to progressively-more memory consumption on the SCM or ACM processor, 1.1:

a presentation (or "direct") volume uses a managed volume as one of its "filers", and

that managed volume is deleted.

The bespd daemon uses up progressively-more memory until it fails and restarts. This daemon's memory consumption is visible in the output of the show system task CLI command.

31488
If an ARX-4000 NSM experiences certain driver issues, the driver writes an excessive number of repetitive log messages to the serial Console. This slows the performance of the network drivers, and masks useful driver logs.

32089
A DAVE 7.x client application can create an issue when opening directories in an ARX volume: if the ARX has a particular failure while opening the directory, the directory remains open after the DAVE client has left it. A directory in this state cannot be deleted or renamed by other clients.

31804
A pair of NSM processors can unexpectedly fail, causing a failover in a redundant pair of ARXes. This is due to the NSM software's incorrect assertion that an internal-memory buffer (for log messages) has overflowed.

31692
The ARX-4000 does not reliably process jumbo frames. (You can enable or disable jumbo frames with the [no] jumbo mtu CLI command.)

Version 4.0.1

Release 4.0.1 included the following fixes and enhancements, also included in this release.

Features

Release 4.0.1 is functionally equivalent to Release 4.0.0. Unlike Release 4.0.0, this release has been fully qualified for use on the ARX-6000 as well as all the other ARX platforms.

Fixes

Release 4.0.1 fixed the following software issues. These fixes are also included in the current release:

32049
The ARX does not re-create its error.log or fastpath files if an administrator deletes one of them. (You can delete these files with the delete logs error.log or delete logs fastpath CLI commands, or their GUI equivalents.)

30720
If an ARX runs active VPUs on both redundant peers (configurable only on earlier versions of ARX software), the CLI or GUI may show incorrect used-file credits for those VPU(s).

31162
An NFS-access list with more than 128 IP addresses can cause the ARX to repetitively reboot if it is used in a presentation (or "direct") volume's attach point.

31255
The ARX-4000 allows the Control Plane to power up when the Data Plane is powered off and/or disconnected. This is an unsupported configuration that causes a software loop and prevents the ARX from fully booting.

31483
If a client reads or writes a file with a particular byte sequence through an ARX-4000 VIP, the ARX stops processing client traffic.

Required Configuration Changes

Starting with Release 5.3.0, the ARX supported licensing of its software on the new ARX-VE. Release 6.0.0+ supports licensing on all ARX platforms.

Before you can use or configure storage services on the ARX, you must activate a valid license. If the ARX has a network connection to the F5 license server at http://activate.f5.com, you can automatically activate the license with the license activate command or its GUI equivalent Otherwise, you can use a manual activation process. Automatic and manual activation are described in the following documents:

ARX Manager Storage Guide (Online Help)

CLI Network Guide

CLI Reference

SAM-Reference Requirements

Release 6.0.0 introduced an option to place multiple namespaces behind a single VIP; for CIFS namespaces, this places new constraints on the sam-reference file server. When CIFS clients ask for available groups to assign to a given file or directory, they invoke a query to the sam-reference file server. If the VIP hosts a single namespace, the sam-reference file server requires all local groups defined in its that namespace. If the VIP hosts multiple namespaces, the sam-reference server must define all local groups from all file servers behind all of those namespaces.

The "character-encoding cifs" CLI Command

The CLI command, character-encoding cifs no longer exists as of Release 6.0. It has been superseded by the wins-name-encoding command in gbl-cifs mode. The former command was in gbl-ns mode. If you run an older global-config script with the gbl-ns command, the command does not function.

For Upgrades from Older Releases

If you are upgrading from an early release, you may require additional configuration changes based on the features you use. The subsections below explain the configuration changes required for various upgrade paths.

For Upgrades from Before 5.2.0

Release 5.2.0 introduced constrained delegation for its CIFS services, and we strongly recommend implementing it for your existing CIFS services. A member of the "Domain Admins" group can implement this at a domain controller (DC). Constrained delegation is a more secure method for running your CIFS services than the unconstrained delegation that was previously available on the ARX. Additionally, clients can use NTLM or NTLMv2 to authenticate to a CIFS service without the aid of an ARX Secure Agent. This is not a required change, but it is strongly recommended.

Rejoining a CIFS Service to its Domain

A CIFS service with a long name may need to rejoin its domain after the change to constrained delegation. If the CIFS service has a name longer than 15 bytes, DCs will reject NTLM or NTLMv2 authentications from the service's clients. (The service name is the first part of the service's FQDN; for example, "myco" would be the name of the service at "myco.ourco.com.") The CIFS-service software raises an SNMP trap if it detects this condition. See the SNMP Reference for details on SNMP traps.

To correct this condition, use the domain-join CLI command or its GUI equivalent. This operation truncates the CIFS-service name and creates a new machine account at the DCs with the shorter name. The CLI or GUI displays the shorter name after you invoke the domain-join operation.

Verify that All Proxy Users Use an FQDN Domain

Any namespace that supports CIFS access has a proxy user that it uses as its identity. The proxy-user configuration is a username, password, and Windows domain that is valid in your Windows network. The proxy user's Domain should always be an FQDN (such as "mysrvr.myco.com") instead of a short name (such as "mysrvr"). This ensures that the ARX can authenticate with Kerberos, which can be vitally important in some situations. This is required to support Constrained Delegation.

Use show namespace namespace-name to find the name of the "proxy-user" for a given namespace.

Use show proxy-user proxy-user-name to see the configured Windows Domain for the proxy user.

If the Windows Domain is a short name, you can use the windows-domain command in gbl-proxy-user mode to change it to an FQDN. (Use the pre-win2k-name argument if you need to specify both the FQDN and a short name that is completely different from the FQDN.)

If the DNS domain name is different than the Active Directory domain name (disjoint domain), the Active Directory FQDN should be used for the global server name. If the DNS FQDN is configured in this type of environment, Kerberos authentication will not work, and enumerating Active Directory groups though the ARX VIP may not be possible.

Rediscovering the AD Forest

The ARX database now keeps the pre-Windows-2000 names for every domain in its active-directory (AD) forest. If your AD forest has a domain with a pre-Windows-2000 name that is not the first component of the full domain name, you must re-discover the AD forest. For example, if a domain in the forest is named "myco.ourco.com" but its pre-Windows-2000 name is "COMPANY" instead of "myco," the ARX software needs to know that some CIFS clients may use "COMPANY" as their domain name. Otherwise, those clients cannot authenticate. You can use the active-directory update CLI command or its GUI equivalent to re-discover the AD forest, including all pre-Windows-2000 domain names.

For Upgrades from Before 5.0.6

This section only applies to installations that upgrade from Release 5.0.6 or earlier. After the upgrade beyond Release 5.1.0, you require the following configuration changes to support all of the release's new features.

Upgrading the Secure Agent for NTLMv2 Support

The ARX cannot support NTLMv2 until all of its ARX Secure Agents (ASAs) are upgraded beyond 5.1.0, too. After you upgrade the ARX to this release, you must also upgrade at least one ASA. We recommend upgrading all of them. There are two versions of the ASA kit: a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version. Refer to the ARX Secure Agent Installation Guide for detailed ASA-download and upgrade instructions.

NOTE: The ASA formerly used pwdump to access a database on the DC; the 5.1.0 release of the ASA software uses other means instead. Please update any anti-virus (AV) application running on your DCs before you use the new ASA version. Refer to Solution Note 10026 for detailed instructions.

CIFS Symlinks: New Scan for Existing Volumes

If your system contained any multi-protocol (CIFS and NFS) volumes before the upgrade to this release, the volumes require a configuration change to take advantage of a software feature. The feature is symlink support for CIFS clients, described above. To activate CIFS symlinks for a multi-protocol volume, use the no cifs deny-symlinks CLI command. You can run this command from gbl-ns-vol mode for the multi-protocol volume. Once you allow CIFS symlinks, the volume must scan its back-end servers for NFS symlinks and record them in its metadata. A CLI prompt allows you to run the scan as a background process; enter yes to proceed with the scan.

For example, this command sequence adds CIFS symlinks support to the "insur~/claims" volume. The prompt indicates that a back-end scan is required, and offers the opportunity to run it in the background:

This volume's configuration has been upgraded from a prior software release.
If symlinks exist in the volume, the volume's metadata must be synchronized
before CIFS clients can take advantage of this feature. You can synchronize
the metadata at any time. User access is not affected by this process but it
may run for hours or days if the volume contains hundreds of millions of files.

To perform the scan (and fully-activate CIFS symlinks) later, you can run the sync files namespace-name volume vol-name command on the volume's namespace. You can run this at any time.

The ARX Manager UI also provides an interface for running the no cifs deny-symlinks and/or the sync files operations.

This operation is not necessary for any multi-protocol volume created after the upgrade to 5.1.0. By default, new volumes allow CIFS clients to use symlinks, and the symlink scan is performed during the initial import of the volume's back-end shares.

Windows 2003 Clusters

If you previously used a Windows 2003 cluster behind a managed volume, you require one of two configurations to continue using the cluster. The first is recommended as a best practice, and the second is for sites where the cluster does not have a shared Service-Principal Name (SPN):

Add the cluster's shared SPN to its configuration on the ARX. From the CLI, you can use the gbl-ext-filer spn command to set this. For example, spn vsrvr@myco.com. This must be a virtual SPN, one that persists after a cluster failover.
This implies that the cluster's virtual-CIFS service must join the local AD domain. For sites where this is not possible, use the option below.

Do not configure any SPN for the Windows 2003 cluster. This is contrary to the user documentation, which states that an SPN is recommended for any Windows cluster or Kerberos-supporting server.
From the CLI, you can use the gbl-ext-filer no spn command to remove the SPN configuration.

In either case, you can use the show external-filer command to map the Windows 2003 cluster's VIP to an "external filer" name on the ARX. Then use external-filer filer-name to enter the CLI mode for that filer, and then the spn or no spn command as needed.

For example, the following command sequence finds the external-filer name for a Windows 2003 cluster and sets its SPN:

For Upgrades from Before 5.0.1

This section only applies to installations that upgrade from Release 5.0.0 or earlier.

Once you have installed the software, you must make the following required configuration change(s).

Unicode Upgrade

This section is for administrators who need to upgrade from releases prior to 5.0.0. The 5.0.0 Release includes a new Unicode library that may have an effect on client files and/or directories. The new version of Unicode adds 168 lower-case versions of characters that were uppercase-only in the previous version. The characters derive from the following languages:

Native-American languages from modern-day Canada, including SENCOTEN.

Greek symbols for editorial markings.

Cyrillic letters that may not be current.

Georgian letters from an ancient ecclesiastical alphabet.

Glagolitic letters; Glagolitic is a historical Slavic alphabet.

Coptic letters, used by the original Christians in Egypt.

After the upgrade to Release 5.0.0, clients cannot open any files or directories with any of these rare characters in their names. This problem should be very rare. The symptoms are different for files than they are for directories, as explained below. If you see these symptoms on any of your files or directories, escalate the problem to F5 Support.

Files

If a Windows client attempts to open a file with one of these characters in its name, an error similar to this appears in Windows Explorer:

Cannot find the \\VIP\unicode/dir1/file%c8%ba.txt

You can resolve this by synchronizing the volume's metadata with the filenames on the filer. From the GUI, go to the Managed Volume Details screen for the volume and click the Sync... button. From the CLI, you can use the sync files command on the ARX volume. This resolves all such file-naming issues in the volume.

Directories

Windows Explorer returns the following error if it attempts to open a directory with one of these characters in its name:

Refers to location that is unavailable

You must rebuild the managed volume if it contains such a directory. From the GUI, go to the Managed Volume Details screen for the volume and click the Rebuild... button. From the CLI, use the nsck ... rebuild command.

For Upgrades from Before 5.0.0

This section only applies to installations that upgrade from Release 4.1.1 or earlier.

Release 5.0.0 introduced two new maintenance features for shadow-copy rules. If your site uses shadow-copy rules, F5 recommends that you use these features after the upgrade to 5.0.0.

Moving the Shadow-Copy Database to the Metadata Share
You can now place a rule's shadow-copy database on the target volume's metadata share. In previous releases, the shadow-copy database resided on the same back-end filers that held the target volume's copied files. As the set of copied files expanded, it became possible to run out of space on the target filer(s), thereby possibly corrupting the database. The shadow volume's metadata does not grow as fast as its user data, and there are SNMP traps to alert you of free-space issues on that share, so the metadata share is typically a better candidate for this database. From the CLI, you can go to gbl-ns-vol-shdwcp mode and use the database-location metadata-share command to move the shadow-volume database the next time the rule runs.
This is only necessary for a shadow-copy rule from before the 5.0.0 upgrade. The next time the rule runs, it migrates the database to the metadata share.

Shadow Copying Names that Match the CIFS "8.3" Pattern
This option only applies to an ARX volume that supports CIFS. CIFS-supporting filers typically create an alternate name for any file or directory whose name is longer than eight characters, or whose extension is longer than three characters. The alternate name matches the old-style "8.3" pattern, with up to eight characters that are optionally followed by a "." and up to three more characters. Typically, filers include a tilde (~) in this alternate name. If a real name on the source volume matches one of these alternate names in the shadow volume, the shadow-copy rule refuses to copy the file by default. This is a rare circumstance, but it is possible in any CIFS volume.
You can change this with a new feature in 5.0.0. From the CLI, you can go to gbl-ns-vol-shdwcp mode and use the cifs-8dot3-resolution command to make the copy possible without overwriting the file with the alternate name.

Refer to the CLI Reference Guide for details on both of these commands.

NOTE: These are not strictly-required configuration changes, but F5 strongly recommends them for customers that use shadow-copy rules on the ARX.

Known Issues

ARX API

A large number of API calls in a short period of time may cause rampart errors to be written to the log. (339710)

This issue was identified during pre-release stress testing.

The ARX API does not accept digest authentication in its SOAP requests. (340615)
The ARX API only accepts basic authentication in its SOAP requests.

Workaround: To ensure that passwords are sent in encrypted form, use HTTPS (instead of HTTP) to connect to the ARX API.

Authentication statistics are not updated when the API caller is authenticated by Active Directory. (341266)

Authentication and Security

The uninstall of the ARX Secure Agent may fail to reboot the DC. (35754)
The uninstall of the Secure Agent must reboot the host machine (typically a DC) to finish. The uninstall process has failed to reboot the host DC on some occasions, but the failure is rare.

Recovery: Manually reboot the DC if the uninstall process fails to reboot it automatically.

Chassis Management

On a few occasions we've found that it is necessary to shutown/startup a newly built ESX-based vARX For Networking To work properly. (366744)

LEDs remain on/lit continuously after chassis power switch has been toggled to the off position. (372477)
The Status and Alarm LEDs on the ARX 2500 remain lit continuously even after the unit's power switch has been set to the Off position.

The LEDs remain lit as long as the power cord is plugged in. If the power cord is unplugged after the power switch has been turned off, the LEDs will turn off, and the LEDs will remain off if the power cord is plugged back in subsequently. When the unit is turned on again, the LEDs will update normally, in the expected sequence.

This functionality is controlled by non-F5 component vendor firmware.

LED Status and Trap can take up to ~5 minutes to occur after power supply status change - consider configurable polling interval. (372495)
It can take up to five minutes for a power supply interruption to be indicated by the ARX's Alarm and Status LEDs, or by SNMP trap.

CLI

Executing the show proc command on an ARX 500+ that has reached its bounce limit may result in the generation of a core file. Reload the ARX software on the switch if this occurs. (367185)

Upgrading a configuration from R5.1.9 to R6.0.0 or later will cause the policy debug minimum-free-space 1024 setting to be exposed in the global configuration. (366827)
This is an internal setting that is not supported for customer use. Execute the command no policy debug minimum-free-space to remove the setting from the global config and restore the setting's value to 512. Note that the units for the values are 512KB and 1024B.

The CLI "show clock" output does not always show the correct time after a time-zone change. (24526)
You can use the clock timezone CLI command to set the time zone of the ARX. On rare occasions, the output from the show clock command does not show the correct time after this change. For example:

The time does not conform to the new time zone, though the correct new time zone (America Denver) does appear in the output.

Workaround: Log out of the CLI and log back in.

During the hour of transition from daylight-savings time to standard time, the clock set CLI command incorrectly interprets times in some time zones. (24709)
Times are ambiguous in the hour when daylight-savings time reverts to standard time, once per year. Suppose the transition occurs at 3 AM on the day of the daylight-savings change: time passes from 3 to 4 AM in daylight-savings time, then the clock goes back to 3 AM for standard time, and then time passes from 3 to 4 AM again. In some time zones, if you reset the clock to a time between 3 and 4 AM, the clock set command may not interpret your time correctly. If this occurs, the ARX assumes that the transition to standard time has already occurred.

This only occurs in time zones that are East of the Prime Meridian, with positive offsets from UTC.

Workaround: Avoid the clock set command during the day and hour of transition.

Config replay fails due to DB schema changes. (27866)
Some upgrades result in database-schema changes. If this upgrade includes a database change, do not use previously-saved configuration scripts because these scripts will not implement the changes properly. Use the 'copy global-config' command to copy (and save) the switch's new global configuration.

Workaround: After upgrading to the new release, use the 'copy global- config' command to copy (and save) the switch's global configuration to a local file, a remote server, or an E-mail recipient.

The CLI displays unintended errors if you interrupt the copy CLI command (with <Ctrl-C>) during the file transfer. (32531)
The CLI copy command prints the following messages while it transfers a large file to or from the ARX:

% INFO: Transferred nnn of total megabytes; still copying . . .

If you press <Ctrl-C> while the CLI is printing these messages, some internal processes continue after the overall copy process halts. After 20-30 seconds, the CLI displays the following errors from those sub-processes:

Report generation may exhibit intermittent problems. (348122)
Report generation may terminate prematurely and create a core file, but will not affect the CLI session otherwise.

Workaround: Re-execute the relevant command, or view the report file directly rather than via the "show file-history" command.

Disaster Recovery

Load Cfg - conflict resolution doesn't allow remote cluster specific entries. (340060)
Once a configuration is up and running on a switch, loading a config file that has cluster-specific commands for the remote cluster will be ignored due to the conflict resolution rules.

This has a significant effect on failover/failback behavior between ARX clusters.

dNAS

An NFS service may become suspended if an nsck rebuild of a volume does not complete. (367641)
The volume that does not complete the rebuild is not exported.

On an ARX 1500 or ARX 2500, it is possible that there may be a connection refused error immediately following the enabling of a share or during the failure of a share to import. (365313)
In the first case, simply execute the enable command another time. In the second case, remove the share and re-enable it.

In a namespace in which both NFS2 and NFS3-TCP are configured, NFS3-UDP is configured also, and cannot be removed. (361417)

Share removal operations may fail if the share path is greater than 4,096 characters in length. (364533)

Documentation

Throughout the ARX user guides and online help, the number of volume groups supported by ARX-1500 is stated incorrectly as 12. (374289)
The correct number of volume groups that ARX-1500 supports is 6.
Refer to ARX System Limits Enforced By Licensing for complete information on the number of volume groups supported per ARX model, along with other information about system limits enforced by licensing.

File Servers

The show exports command requires an external-filer object to examine a Windows cluster. (36728)
The CLI show exports command is designed to examine the shares on a filer or server before you define the server in the ARX database. However, the ARX requires a Service-Principal Name (SPN) to examine a Windows 2008 cluster, and the show exports command does not support an SPN option.

Workaround: Define an external-filer object for the cluster, set the correct spn in the external-filer object, and then use that external-filer object in the show exports command. The CLI Storage Guide provides detailed instructions on creating an external filer, setting its SPN, and using it in the show exports command.

An ARX running 5.2.0+ cannot import a CIFS share from an Isilon storage server running a version of OneFS that is older than version 6.5. (341470)
Isilon storage servers were not previously qualified for use behind an ARX volume. However, it was possible to import CIFS shares from Isilon servers before Release 5.2.0. If an Isilon share is already imported before the installation of 5.2.0, it continues to function behind the ARX volume until there is a re-import. On import or re-import of an Isilon share, the import may fail with a CIFS_PRIVCHK_FAIL error. Contact F5 Support to work around this issue.

This failure only occurs in a managed volume with persistent-acls enabled.

This may also be an issue with other unqualified servers whose CIFS services are based on Samba.

GUI

UTF-8 Chinese characters are truncated in namespace name. (30941)
If a user enters Chinese characters that exceed the GUI's limit for any input field, the GUI will not issue an error message but instead simply truncates the input.

The GUI input fields limit input based on characters and not bytes. When entering multi-byte characters, the input may be truncated if the total number of bytes representing the characters exceed the internal byte limit.

The GUI process uses 100% of CPU 1.1 on an ARX with thousands of reports. (31068)

SSH Applet for CLI freezes when pressing <TAB> key. (340230)
This phenomenon occurs as a result of the interaction between a third-party applet and the web browser in use.

Infrastructure

The ARX-VE does not support the use of virtual machine snapshots. (344833)

A RAID rebuild never completes for a drive if you remove it and replace it during the rebuild operation (354351)
If you remove an ARX-1500 or ARX-2500 hard disk during a raid rebuild operation, the rebuild may never complete after you replace the disk.

Workaround: Allow a raid rebuild operation to complete before removing the disk that you are rebuilding.

L2 Software

For any VLAN, if you type the command, member 1/3, followed by another command that adds member 1/3 again, for example, members 1/3 to 1/4, a VLAN member named 0/0 will be added to the configuration, and will not be removable. (366147)

L3/L4 Load Balancing

Namespace Software

NSCK reports do not identify "marked" multi-protocol directories where you should run a sync files operation. (23891)
Some multi-protocol (NFS and CIFS) directories are "marked" for special processing. These directories contain files and/or subdirectories one of these naming issues:

the name resembles a Filer-Generated Name (FGN, such as "myfile~1.txt"), or

the name produces an FGN on its back-end filers (such as "my:file.txt," or "MYFILE" in the same directory as "myfile").

If a directory is marked with one of these naming issues, the volume performs extra processing whenever a client tries to introduce an entry with the other naming issue. Depending on the outcome of the processing, the new client entry could become NFS-only (inaccessible to CIFS clients). Refer to the CLI Maintenance Guide for details.

Clients can resolve these issues by accessing the volume through its VIP and renaming the directory's entries. However, the directory mark persists after all of its child entries have been correctly renamed; you use the sync files CLI command to remove the mark.

The issue is that there are no reports that identify a directory as "marked" after its entries have been correctly renamed.

Workaround: Use sync files to clear the directory mark immediately after renaming its entries.

You must separately export a CIFS managed volume if you use it as a "managed volume" behind a CIFS direct (presentation) volume. (21231, 24359)
If a CIFS-managed volume is used as a managed volume in a CIFS-presentation volume, its CIFS front-end service must export the managed volume separately. This is in addition to the export for the presentation (or direct) volume. (The same CIFS service must export both volumes.)

Spurious metadata inconsistency in CIFS presentation volumes. (354538)
If you run a metadata-inconsistency report on a CIFS-only presentation (or direct) volume, all of the attach points appear as inconsistencies in the report. (You can invoke the metadata-inconsistency report with the nsck ... report inconsistencies CLI command or its GUI equivalent.).

NFS

Customer outages caused by adding new IP interfaces to NetApp. (341951)
The NetApp filer responds to portmap requests from the ARX with an IP address that is different than that sent by the ARX. The ARX declines the portmap response and the corresponding NFS service goes offline.

NSM Software

If multiple NSMs exhibit warm-restarts in succession, one or more of the NSMs may not restart correctly and will remain in the Standby state. (366143)
A failover is needed to correct the problem.

The ARX cannot send E-mail messages through the out-of-band (OOB) management interface. NTP, DNS, RADIUS, and snapshot-management services (SSH and RSH) are also unsupported through the OOB interface. (24595)
All e-mail notifications from the ARX go out through an in-band (VLAN) management interface, configured with the interface vlan CLI command. At least one in-band-management interface must have a route to the E-mail server for E-mail notifications to function. The same applies to NTP, DNS, and RADIUS services, as well as SSH and RSH for managing filer snapshots.

Workaround: Use the cfg-mode ip route command (without the mgmt flag) to add a static IP route to the E-mail server(s), NTP server(s), DNS server(s), and/or RADIUS servers. All filers and file servers must have a route to be useable by the ARX at all, so this is less likely to be an issue for SSH and RSH.

Spurious errors appear in the syslog after an NSM failover. (25782)
NSM processors have redundant peers, even in an ARX that is not configured for overall redundancy. If an NSM processor fails, its peer processes packets for both. If nsm recovery is enabled, the failed processor comes back online and waits to take over for the running processor. The failed processor may repeatedly put the following message in the syslog:

An ARX-4000 does not support jumbo frames with 4.1.0 software and older firmware. (32103)
On an ARX-4000 that is running 4.1.0 or later software with an earlier version of firmware, NSM cores fail if they are configured for jumbo frames. (You can enable or disable jumbo frames with the [no] jumbo mtu CLI command.)

Workaround: A workaround is only necessary if you upgrade an ARX4000 from Release 4.0.0 or earlier. In this case, upgrade the ARX4000 with the latest firmware as part of the installation process. For installation instructions, including the method for upgrading firmware, refer to the Upgrading Software chapter in the CLI Maintenance Guide.

Policy

ARX-1500 and ARX-2500 do not support Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 (taroon) due to an incompatibility in NFS security. (367280)

A shadow-copy rule runs indefinitely (instead of terminating immediately) when the RON connection to the target share fails. (32110)
A shadow-copy rule should fail as soon as the RON connection to the target filer fails. Instead, it continues indefinitely, waiting for the RON connection to return.

T2 files unexpectedly moved to T1 (age-based). (343985)
A file-placement rule with an age-based fileset can function incorrectly when it uses a schedule with the following settings:

- a start time in the 11 O'Clock hour, and

- set to run every Saturday.

The time calculation can fail on the night before the fall DST change. This causes the file-placement rule to run with an invalid time stamp and migrate the wrong files.

Service Manger/Service Agent

large NFS copies using file tracking trigger bad system behavior. (365985)
The file tracking copy of metadata to an NFS share may cause user processes to hang for extended periods of time, leading to false service outages because the user processes go unscheduled.

Workaround: Use a CIFS share when copying metadata to the file tracking archive.

Shadow Volume

The ARX makes its best effort when performing shadow-copy of streams that have invalid names on an EMC filer to a Windows shadow volume. (366633)
As a result, the shadow-copy operation may be unsuccessful.

Snapshots

Spurious syslog errors after snapshot commands. (32230)
After a snapshot command like show snapshot or its GUI equivalent, the following spurious error may appear in the syslog file (available through the GUI or the show logs syslog CLI command):

OM_RECORD_READ_FAILED:: A record read from the configuration database failed.
Record result code [noMoreRecords [4]] Record name [StorageContainer]
Debug string [containerName="", filerId=0].

Upgrading the ARX software to Release 6.1.0 can cause a "filer-type windows" entry to be removed from an external filer definition. (373931)

Workaround: Retype the filer-type windows command.

Supportability

Under very rare circumstances, the ARX may block administrative logins after a reboot. (32537)
An ARX in the F5-Development laboratory did not allow administrative logins after a reboot. Logins to the serial-Console port always timed out after entering the administrative password, and logins to the Out-of-Band Management port (typically labeled "MGMT") were rejected with this error message:

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

F5 Development has been unable to reproduce this problem, despite hundreds of reboots. We note it here until the problem is proven to be unreproducible at any customer site.

Recovery: Power cycle the ARX.

The 'copy namespace' command does not work on direct (presentation) mapped volumes. (34692)
The copy namespace operation cannot copy a file to a CIFS file server behind a direct (presentation) volume.

On the ARX-4000, CoreCollector code has been changed and may display old cores that were never collected and reported. (34722)
The new CoreCollector code now correctly reports all cores from the current release and previous releases. It may find cores that were never collected and reported.

If you replay a 5.2.0+ global-config on a system with an earlier release, domain-join fails for CIFS services. (39767)
The run configs global-config-file CLI command "plays" the global-config-file on the ARX, so that the ARX takes the full storage and policy configuration in that file. Every global-config file contains a special CLI command, kerberos-creds, to keep its CIFS services joined to their Windows Domains during this operation. The 5.2.0 version of this hidden command has changed, so the command fails if played on an ARX running an older release. Therefore, the CIFS services are unjoined to their domains after you use run configs global-config-file.

Workaround: Manually edit the 5.2.0+ global config file so that the kerberos-creds command conforms to earlier releases. Specifically, remove the last three entries from the command. For example, if you find an entry like this in the 5.2.0+ global-config file:

The above command can play back on an ARX running a pre-5.2.0 release.

ARX-500, ARX-1000, ARX-2000, ARX-4000, and ARX-6000 do not send 'nsmResourceThreshold' traps until the NSM resource is >100%. (356176)
The ARX monitors its NSM resources and should send an nsmResourceThreshold SNMP trap whenever an NSM process attempts to exceed 80%, 90%, or 100% of any of these resources. The issue is that the ARX does not send any nsmResourceThreshold trap until a process tries to exceed 100% of an NSM resource. It does not send traps when an NSM resource exceeds 80% or 90% of its capacity.

This does not apply to the ARX-VE, ARX-1500, or ARX-2500 platforms.

Known Limitations

The ARX does not support the use of client-side caching through the ARX virtual IP interface. (373163, 373424)